Gill Bates spoonerism gets around Twitter censorship glitches
Despite being the chief executive of both Twitter and the payments company Square, Jack Dorsey seems to be ignorant of the vast power he wields. The nose ring and Rasputin beard do go a long way in adding to this image of a hapless genius, but this inability — or unwillingness — to lead has real world consequences.
Twitter blocked access to dozens of accounts in India recently, including some that belonged to high-profile individuals, to comply with a “legal demand”, prompting confusion and anger among users who are seeking an explanation for this action.
The app has since quietly restored the accounts, without explanation.
Unlike in the United States, Twitter has historically failed to perform the most basic level of content moderation in India. Most trending topics in India appear either manipulated, paid for, outdated or dangerous — and sometimes, all the above.
We also got a taste of this oft lamented “censorship” a few weeks ago when the Twitter profile of the Mail & Guardian’s The Continent was blocked for 12 hours until an “offensive tweet” had been deleted. Shortly after this, M&G Africa editor Simon Allison was subsequently also hit with the suspension hammer.
The crime? Tweeting about the suspension and his own article about “Bill Gates, Big Pharma and entrenching the vaccine apartheid”. Clicking the link, any reader would have seen that it was a fact-based, legitimate comment about Gates not endorsing the removal of patents on vaccines, with a response from the man himself.
As a workaround, Gates’s name had to be changed to “Gill Bates” to avoid being muzzled again.
When it comes to regulating online speech, governments and businesses feel dangerously adrift and equally unaccountable. To find a way out, platforms have to clearly and publicly define their terms of use, invest in more human content moderation, and apply it to everyone.
Algorithms on their own are dreadfully insufficient and often incapable of perceiving nuance, The Continent fiasco being one of many cases that prove that.
Another, which really highlights the absurdity of its approach, saw a Chess Youtuber temporarily removed because of a statement such as “black goes to B6 instead of C6. White will always be better.”
The internet behemoths are being accorded more and more power.
In 2018, Pew Research found that “about two-thirds of US adults (68%) get news on social media sites. One in five get news there often”.
The combination of Facebook, Google and Twitter controls the information received by huge numbers of Americans, Pew found. “Facebook is still far and away the site Americans most commonly use for news.
About four in 10 Americans (43%) get news on Facebook.
The next most commonly used site for news is Youtube [owned by Google], with 21% getting news there, followed by Twitter, at 12%.”
Although Twitter still falls short of Facebook in terms of number of users, a 2019 report found that “Twitter remains the leading social network among journalists at 83%”. Censoring a story from Twitter thus has a disproportionate effect, by hiding it from the people who determine and shape the news.
The issue of global content moderation on social media is a broad and sweeping debate, one that will not be solved any time soon.
What is clear is that there is an urgent need to put safeguards in place to prevent journalists from getting stuck in the mire and immobilised from providing their necessary service.
This is particularly true in Africa where sarcasm, humour, nuance and twists of language are all too often lost on Western mechanical programming.
Kiri Rupiah & Luke Feltham write The Ampersand newsletter for subscribers. Go to mg.co.za to sign up for the best local and international journalism handpicked and in your inbox every weekday