Twitter banning twitch streamers for a poem about Elite

[skunkmunkey]

Hi there,

 

Hopefully this is allowed and not against any of the rules, if it is then let me know and I'll change accordingly. A little bit of background, I know DJ Truthsayer and go back years with him when we lived in the same town, went to college together and hang out etc. Lost contact with him a bit over the last few years but still want to try to help a mate out. Yes, I'm a bit biased on this but hopefully you can all see this is a bit of a ridiculous situation.

 

Firstly a twitch streamer called Tim Wellens replied to a tweet from the official Elite Dangerous account containing a poem with a poem of his own about killing characters from within the game. The twitter police bots have then banned him for supposedly breaking the rules and threatening violence. Of course anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that there was no actual threat of violence and this is just an automated system over-reacting. If he could then appeal to a real person this would easily be the end of it, he'd have his account back and all would be well. However at the moment it seems like he's not going to be getting his account back.

 

The second issue is then DJ Truthsayer replied to a banter video that one of his friends had posted, clearly about the game saying that "I'm going to kill you, when I'm not ill". Whilst I can see a little more about how this could be perceived as a threat of violence, there needs to be some form of common sense appeals process that can be dealt with by a human that can see that the comments refer to a computer game in which players do try to kill each other. It's a game it's very different to publicly stating direct that you actually want to kill the person.

 

Whilst for most people, losing a twitter account isn't the end of the world however these guys use their accounts to promote their twitch streams and inform their viewers of what's happening etc. Whilst I know a lot of people here don't care much for streamers etc I am hoping that you can at least understand that people potentially losing their incomes to a harmless comment picked up by an automated system is something that is not right and the need for further discussion regarding this form of automated policing within social media is something that needs to happen.

 

For further info, I'll post the link to the Eurogamer story which has been covering this;

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-10-08-elite-dangerous-banned-from-twitter-for-writing-a-poem-about-killing-thargoids

 

Like I say, I am biased in this, I am trying to help a mate out by hopefully causing a discussion in a well know tech forum and with the possibility of getting it noticed by people who do have influence within the industry but at the same time I do think that the appeals process to things like this needs to be made clearer. I know some will say that Twitter can make their own rules etc however since these networks have become big enough that peoples livelihoods can depend on them I think that some fairer form of appeal process is needed. To me it seems hugely unfair that commenting about killing a fictional alien race within a video game leads to a ban yet some of the other bile-filled hatred that goes on on twitter everyday is allowed to happen with no consequence.

[Fasauceome]

Most of the time if you cause a ruckus in the public eye by calling out the platform they'll have no choice but to appeal. Having a tweet sent out lambasting the bans will have some good results.

[skunkmunkey]

That's kinda what I'm hoping, just trying to get people talking about it in the hope something might happen

 

It's not much but it's something

[aezakmi]

Twitter is a shit site

[Arika]

Well... Yeah, it's twitter, what do you expect from a platform with trigger happy moderators who are the self appointed guardians of people's feeling. There's going to be someone out there (who spilled out from tumblr) who identifies as a thargoid  or is thargoidkin..... And therefore finds it offensive..... 

[Sakkura]

Tim Wellens should stick to cycling.

[Cereal5]

Twitter, claiming to be a place one can say anything, ironically has a shit ton of restrictions for why you can say. Assuming twitter has not heard of elite dangerous before, which is very possible, yeah I think it’s reasonable that the bot banned the account. I think it would also be reasonable for actual human moderators to unban the account, and st least let the owner know that the bot does that, and the account won’t be unbanned again. But who knows what will actually happen. 

[skunkmunkey]

I agree, I do fully understand why the bot banned the account, it's the lack of human moderation to rectify that I take issue with. If you're managing a network with that many subscribers you need to have the resources in place to deal with this kind of thing - if nothing else it'll help prevent bad publicity stories like this.

[AntonChigurh]

Further proof that Twitter is just reddit with a character limit and shittier memes. Same circlejerk, same banhappy mods, same ability to have millions of users and seemingly infinite content yet still not be worth the 3 seconds it takes to open the app

[skunkmunkey]

I was speaking to him last night and he had an interesting idea. If you get banned on there you then pay a $10 deposit to have your appeal dealt with by a human, if you win your appeal you get the money back, if you don't you don't. Would probably stop 95% of the spurious appeals in an instant and those that have genuine reasons to appeal can be dealt with in a better manner.

[skunkmunkey]

Just to give a little update on this, it appears that Tim Wellens account has now been reinstated. No news yet about DJTruthsayer's account though.

 

It seems that Twitter got wind of the Eurogamer article and have responded to Tim's case so hopefully the same can happen for the other account too.