My friend and fellow Mile End Road economist Danny Blanchflower has fallen foul of Twitter. They have suspended his account:
I have spoken to Danny.
He has been given no reason for his suspension.
There is, apparently, no appeal.
This is not the way for Twitter to win friends, influence, users, and at the end of the day, revenue.
I hope they change their mind. Whatever Danny did wrong, his opinion is worth hearing. And if he is a little robust at times, so is the world that we live in.
That world is also unfair and anti-democratic. It seems Twitter is intent on replicating that.
Meanwhile, the reason why I have dropped the focus on Twitter that I had at one time to concentrate effort here is, I suspect, easy to understand. It has been some time since I posted a thread there, and I can't see me bothering again, but I will still share posts from here on their site, as I also do on Mastodon and Facebook.
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Agreed – contrast that with the rubbish I was hearing on R4 last night – that the latest bank failure in the U.S was because ‘depositor’s just withdrew their money’ (nothing to do with Trump’s loosening of solvency requirements then) and that the 2008 crash was just a problem with mortgages (nothing to do with what the market was doing to those mortgages – mortgages are the problem per se).
The anti-democracy element you speak of reaches is highest effectiveness in a narrowly based source of information to society which makes your comment in response to Danny’s removal compelling.
Whilst not disagreeing with the critique of the R4 “emission” – perhaps it needs to be seen as one element in “Keeping the Rabble (mentally) in line” (to use a Chompsky title) – thus it falls into the class of propaganda, a bit of truth (mortgages) but nothing about securitisation & an out-of-control banking sector – instead some conforting balm for UK peasants & serfs. Causing questions to be raised must be avoided at all times – why would a government propaganda arm do that?
Of course – totally agree with your summary Mike, but it still does not stop me from being stopped in my tracks by the BBC’s woeful presentation of these problems.
The BBC’s complicity is to me at least a symptom of a dying culture, indeed a dying species. If its not the fact that we can’t get our facts right, it’s also that we seem to have lost any form of moral compass – how the hell have the Tories really stayed power after making students go into debt (who have seen the interest on these loans rise), austerity, the bedroom tax – you could go on and on and on.
And at the end of it we have Stymied and to use John Warren’s rather apt description – a neo-liberal cartel to fall back on and take us into the future.
Twitter instigate bans for racism, abusive behaviour or bullying. It is not anti democratic to do so. I suspect your definition of “robust” has fallen into one of these categories. No doubt many people have been banned. The moderators will have no clue as to who Danny Blanchflower is or his politics. It’s the same rule for all. Surely that is fair?
Then warnings, explanations and the opportunity to return are also provided.
You are advocating totalitarian unfairness
Transparency, dear boy. Transparency.
“Roy Kent” (unlikely to be his real name, as anyone who has watched ‘Ted Lasso’ on Apple TV will realise) is effectively accusing Danny Blanchflower of being abusive, a bully or a racist. Anyone with any familiarity with Danny’s Twitter feed (before he was suspended) would realise that is a ludicrous accusation to make. How we love trolls like Kent, hiding behind pseudonyms while spouting this garbage.
Ah, is that what the reference was?
Wholly agreed about Danny, who is rightly pretty fed up about this
I too was suspended “permanently” (Twitter’s most severe punishment) without reason. On Good Friday no less. There is an appeal opportunity but it gets you nowhere, and though you ask which rule you’re supposed to have broken they don’t tell you. An email returns saying that after careful consideration, they’ve decided not to reinstate you, and signs off “thanks”. I’m not convinced a human is involved anywhere in the process.
There are many others similarly suspended for no apparent reason. It’s been going on for many months. I came across a blog/website where many ‘victims’ seemed quite devastated. It seems to be quite random and I suspect it may be an algorithm problem. It makes no business sense as you say.
I now follow you on Mastodon, but few others I followed post there at all.
I quite like Mastodon
But you are right – it is much less used
And sorry to hear that you were victimised in this way
I am amused that someone thinks Twitter only bans people for “legitimate” reasons, and that not having any effective means of appeal, or navigable and understandable process, is fair. Also that moderators are involved. Didn’t Musk sack most of them? I suspect that AI does most of the work. So it’s all down to algorithms. Someone, somewhere writes the rules, but what they are exactly, and how you might fall foul of them, I doubt anybody knows in full. Or if they do, they won’t for long. Because Elon’s latest whim will demand yet another tweak…
Imagine a legal system where the laws were written down, but you weren’t able to see them, and even if you could, they were in machine code which was understandable to a tiny number of specialists. And they were continually being changed but not through any sort of transparent or accountable process. And when you transgressed these laws you weren’t arrested, charged and tried, but simply had a sentence imposed on you instantly. We’d all be happy with that, and we’d all agree it was fair – so long as it was applied equally, wouldn’t we? Welcome to the AI future. Robocop meets the Terminator meets 1984.
It’s all eerily like the plot of a Kafka novel.