Still Report #503 – Trouble with Twitter
from Bill Still
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Please stick with this video to the end where I’ll be announcing a scientific experiment I’d like you to participate in.
I have to admit, I was very slow to come on to Twitter. I still don’t know my ampersands from my hashtags. And if you are trying to communicate with me, forget Twitter. I think the only person I follow is Trump. My primary mode of interacting with the world is what you are looking at right now, or email.
The other day, Mr. Tweet sent me an auto-tweet saying some tweet t I had twutted was doing really well and would I like to “boost” it – in other words spend some money to advertise.
So, I signed up for $50 worth of teeting- enhancement services – not sure what it was – and off we went. Bottom line is It was just wasted money, if you ask me.
So then, yesterday, I decided to look into boosting my YouTube on Obama not using executive orders to make guns harder to get.
I wrote a nice little piece about the situation and thought I’d give it a little boost – try one more time.
Well, look at what I found. The Twats didn’t want my stinkin’ money. I was immediately suspicious because I don’t put offensive language in my pieces and don’t promote hatred in any way.
So I started looking back and noticed a relationship. That little red-letter notice saying I was not eligible seemed to appear every time I talked about Obama or Muslims. Hmmmmm.
I mentioned it to my wife – who reads a lot — and what do you know; she had just read a couple of things on Twitter.
First of all, last October, a Saudi billionaire, Prince Alwaleed doubled his stake in Twitter. He now owns a billion dollars worth of the stock – about 5%. He’s the biggest stock holder.
Twitter has always been seen as a very risky bet. How do you monetize a 140-character message, that’s built for minimum size and maximum speed?
Here’s the graph of Twitter’s stock performance since it went public in 2013. It’s lost about 63% of its value.
Secondly, according to this piece last April by Cheryl Chumley on Internet News, conservative author Michelle Malkin had tweeted the following:
“Conservative Twitter users raising troubling questions whether @Twitter’s new ‘quality filter’ is censoring based on ideology.”
That tweet was favorited and retweeted over a thousand times.
Yeah. I’d noticed that even my best YouTubes – ones that end up getting over 100,000 hits, will get less than 5 retweets. Ok, now I had a conspiracy theory brewing.
Malkin explained that the “quality filter” terminology came from a Twitter corporate announcement:
“Quality filtering aims to remove all Tweets from your notifications timeline that contain threats, offensive or abusive language, duplicate content or are sent from suspicious accounts.”
But that policy is NOT applied uniformly.
Malkin told the story about Washington Times writer, Doug Ernst. He got a death threat via tweet:
“@WashTimes @douglasernst WE WILL FIND YOU & KILL YOU #DEATHTOAMERICA.”
Now that’s pretty strong.
Ernst questioned Twitter and got the following response:
“We were unable to take action on the account given that we could not determine a clear violation of the Twitter rules….”
Ernst took to Twitter and posted his outrage. Within seconds his Twitter account was suspended.
However in an article in the Washington Post a few months ago, Twitter founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey asserted:
“Twitter stands for freedom of expression, and we will not rest until that is recognized as a global fundamental human right.”
“Users may not make threats of violence or promote violence, including threatening of promoting terrorism.”
Seems to me that he violated both of those assertions in the case of Doug Ernst.
So here’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to conduct a scientific experiment. I post a Twitter announcement of every YouTube I put up. But it never seems to get many likes or retweets.
So please go on and like and retweet this Youtube announcement on Twitter. Then, please email me if you did. Send email to: [email protected]
I’ll total them up in a few days and report my findings.
I’m still reporting from Washington. Good day.
Source: http://financialsurvivalnetwork.com/2016/01/still-report-503-trouble-with-twitter/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=still-report-503-trouble-with-twitter
