This really sucks to hear. What’s unclear to me is whether Twitter is being negligent or abnormal here or whether this is just shitty world politics unfolding partly on Twitter. Twitter is being used by both sides to fight over a narrative. Nothing new in that respect.<p>The author doesn't really propose a solution other than Twitter essentially siding with him and take (what appears to me to be) a political stance. Of course moderating political topics isn’t outside Twitter’s wheelhouse, but this is what you get as a society when you let arbitrary entities arbitrate speech: ambiguity and unclear expectations.<p>On the one hand, it’s reasonable for the author to expect that Twitter removes clear misinformation from their platform since that’s what they purportedly claim to do. On the other hand doing so would go against a national narrative and piss off lots of Pakistanis. Uh oh.<p>Maybe Twitter was never about being arbiters of facts and instead just pandering to the popular political narrative of the time? Or maybe they are objective and they’re just trying their best and we’re all human and we’ll do better next time? Regardless, this is the reason people get so frustrated with censorship: it cannot be applied objectively and fairly in every case.<p>Twitter and social commentary aside: sounds like the author needs political asylum or at least real protection. Twitter is not the right entity to depend on to handle this situation, I fear.
I am sorry for the responses I am seeing on HN. People with cushy lives who've likely never faced similar danger seem to just not really get it.<p>I will say that your framing is one that most Westerners will have trouble taking seriously.<p>It might go over better to document known cases where this pattern occurred and show the similarities. Walk people through it like they are five, so to speak.<p>I know it's hard to do that kind of objective writing when you are feeling so threatened due to genuine threats, but in my experience that approach works better.<p>I know you didn't ask for advice. I apologize for my bad habit of trying to be helpful in the only way I know how.<p>I hope something improves soon.
> <i>Twitter, despite millions of Pakistani users, it seems has no moderation system that understands local dynamics.</i><p>Many would argue they don't even understand the local dynamics of the U.S. It's impossible for twitter to be an arbiter of the truth around the world, and you shouldn't expect them to be. However, I understand that's cold comfort for someone facing the threat of torture, death, or exile from their home, and I think your decision to call out twitter using your own platform to act with respect to your specific circumstances is the right thing to do and really the only way to handle this kind of thing.<p>Good luck, I hope you stay safe and that the government doesn't succeed in silencing you.
Sad to say, but people often [want|need|expect] a corporation to act as a [competent|reliable|trustworthy] [government|law-enforcement agency|court].<p>Corporations are very clearly none of those things, and generally have lots of disincentive against attempting to fake being any of those things.
I think this is one case that goes to the heart of what we expect Twitter to be.<p>If they are supposed to be a public square, a company that is simply meant to offer a technical means of broadcasting your opinions, then we can't also expect them to fight government propaganda, any more than we would expect that of, say, Google Search.<p>On the other hand, if we want Twitter to be a kind of new media company, than we should indeed hold them to journalistic standards and expect them to cut through government lies wherever they decide to have a presence.
I'm not saying Twitter is in the right here, but I'm not convinced by the article that Twitter is meaningfully increasing the danger to the OP. Is a corrupt government really going to avoid kidnapping/torturing someone because they're popular on Twitter?
Being realistic: if your life hangs by the thread of twitter moderation, you should either run and hide, or get your affairs in order. If they really want you dead, even the best possible twitter moderation won't keep you safe. This whole circumstance of people wanting you dead is not twitters fault and there is very little twitter could do to protect you even if their moderation was perfect.
He complains that Twitter doesn't know local Pakistani politics, but what would be the answer in this case? Set up national moderation offices? In this very case, they would just say yeah he's a spy... Unless you want random unaccountable expats making judgment calls about your government
I can see where he’s coming from, but Twitter is a media company. They are not directly responsible for anyone’s safety and have no reason to take down content that isn’t a direct threat or clear defamation. That’s the police or justice system’s job. An unfortunate situation but he is barking at the wrong tree it seems.
its interesting to see supporter of the previous govt who silenced most of the journalists and activists from twitter with heavy handed law enforcement tactics, now claiming to be a freedom of speech proponent<p>For those who do not know, PTI owned and operated largest bots and trolls network who habitually abused people who ever would disagree with them. Consider them TRUMP supporters like mentality people in Pakistan
Something happened this year with Twitter's internal moderation policies. They seemed to have completely stopped enforcing the rules.<p>I've reported many open bigots calling for violence against the group(s) and/or people they hate. Twitter used to ban people for promoting violence. They don't anymore. Not a single one of the posts or accounts I've reported in the past few months has been banned unless they reached a threshold of other reports that triggers an automatic ban.<p>Moderators either aren't doing their job or don't exist anymore.
Poke the bear, and the bear might poke back.<p>Interesting that this person's conception of free speech allows him to call a parliamentary no-confidence vote a "coup", but doesn't allow government-aligned forces to say he is inciting violence.
Twitter is in a bit of a pickle here. One could argue that accusing someone of being an agent of a hostile foreign power is basically libel and should be banned. But it's hard to say how they could have a rule against baselessly accusing a Pakistani of being an agent of Israel or India while maintaining the rule that it is fine to baselessly accuse an american of being an agent of Russia.
It's politically impossible for Twitter to start censoring people who are declaring without evidence that other people are on the payroll of a foreign government or organization and guilty of the capital crimes of espionage and treason.<p>It's far more likely that they'll start labeling tweets with "This tweet was posted by a probable agent of a foreign government for the purpose of sowing discord."
Should twitter censor such tweets? I don’t think so unless it violates their terms - but if the target disputes it then they should label it as disputed - with link to dispute report if it passes basic checks.<p>That said I know this can be abused just like dmca take down notices. It’s truly arduous to balance and context matters which in turn requires godly number of man hours.
Sounds like this dude expects Twitter to be the World Police? I wouldn't expect Twitter as a company to help me if my right to be a gay man in the UK were being infringed; I'd expect the UK government to help me - and beyond that, in the case of a corrupt government, I'd expect other countries to apply pressure internationally to try to resolve the situation.<p>But no, I would not expect Twitter to be responsible in the same way I wouldn't blame a brand of honey for my murder if that's what my murderer had had for breakfast. There are two parties in this: this dude and the Pakistani Gov, Twitter is just a communications channel - it could just as easy be WhatsApp or TikTok or Facebook or HN.
This coup is supported by the current administration of the US of A - you can ask your friendly, neighbourhood retired intelligence officers for their analysis. Imran Khan was causing issues and he was ousted with US support. There is nothing you can do against the American state when it decides on "regime change".
I have no idea how to help you in this situation, but you may want to reach out to Citizen Lab in Toronto. My understanding is that protecting people like you is their mission.
Suppose we have access to Twitter's metrics and we can see the profit made via Pakistani accounts and the associated cost (moderation is a cost).<p>I suspect that the balance is negative for most countries and that is why we cannot expect better moderation.
In the new (increasingly lawless) world order, not having any enemies is going to be a big advantage. It's a good time to make amends and disassociate from extremist or nationalist groups.
Pakistan in a nutshell - the country is ruled by the military, the military is ruled by the ISI. If they have you in their crosshair - run. They will get you.
Interesting that he believes the regime change is a coup. Khan, the now-ousted former prime minister, appears to be a Trump-style strong man who is whipping up his supporters with claims that the vote of no confidence which removed him is actually a U.S.-led conspiratorial regime change.<p>Might be right, and it's absolutely awful if these folks are being unjustly detained and tortured.<p>Yet, I think it's more complicated than the author would lead us to believe. It's also fascinating how this kind of unrest is unfolding all around the world.
Does anyone know how companies like Twitter do moderation in countries like Pakistan. Hiring locals could be dangerous when coup happens. Hiring Pakistani expats (there’s plenty) tricky too as their families are still in danger (I assume their military is sophisticated enough to track whose relative works where). What is the ration of moderators to active user count. Do they specifically hire oppressed groups (i.e. Kurds in Turkey, Tibetans and Uighurs in China, etc) to shed a different opinion?
Yes yes, we're all gonna die because people are allowed to post on the internet. Decentralized messaging platforms should be illegal because they can't be moderated. You should only be able to host an internet service with a license and yearly federal inspections to make sure you're properly storing and backing up accountability logs of all users.<p>> blah blah blah there are insane people in my country who will kill people based on tweets<p>This is a problem of people and not Twitter. Those are in the west too and growing especially in America. The problem is dumbed down people who believe stuff on the internet. And idiots who react to things, like a white/black shooting a black/white. There is a solution to this: going to jail for murder. Even boomers in the 90s knew not to believe anything online. Twitter has about a million problems with it and lack of moderation certainly is not one of them.<p>You cannot reasonably ask Twitter to moderate for your locale's social and violent reactionary issues. That implies they need to hire a huge amount of people for every locale in every country and just gives Twitter more monopoly as another company would have to invest a billion dollars to do that before they can even get off the ground. You have just created this idea that storing 100 bytes of text on a server is now a thing that requires billions of dollars of up front investment to do. This is another issue: People are fucking stupid and expect companies to have some "responsibility" now (despite the fact that product quality is at an all time low and they somehow have no issue with that). This is also just conceding that companies are some kind of god (they really aren't. Twitter is a dog shit website that can't go more than one second without showing the text "undefined" in an important field on the page).<p>Ironically, the people who demand so called justice by moderating more and more shit online (Unreal Engine now has voice analytics to report you to the police or whatever the fuck built right in), are just as bad as the people who foster misinformation against people. We are heading into an era of micro justice which just means the amount of malpolicing will grow in proportion. The end result of constantly trying to solve micro injustices is AI making sure humans don't do anything "bad" and you will literally be unable to involuntarily move your arm a certain way without being punished. There is not even a philosophically correct definition of justice in law. It's literally a bunch of dudes amending a global ruleset to solve the latest problem, based on wildly varying rationales from people each with entirely different value systems.<p>It's actually hilarious how short sighted and oblivious statements like "it should be illegal to post misinformation online" are. You aren't a mature responsible adult or whatever you think you are. You are just reacting to something in the most straight forward way with no thought about the consequences. It's doubly hilarious for insinuating that posting things online is a big issue that we should focus law on. It's actually pretty fucking obnoxious actually, I'm sick of every thing I do online for the last 20 years being policed by hall monitors tunnel visioned on whatever social injustice issue of the day.
Extremely sad to hear. I don't think Twitter can be used to promote change. Or get your voice to the masses. They only care about propagating their own propaganda.<p>Leave Twitter. Try one of the mastodon instances, instead. Be anonymous.