Twitter Founder Announces Strict New Thought Police Rules

In a series of tweets on Friday, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey laid out vague reasoning for implementing some new rules governing content.

1/ We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past 2 years.

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 14, 2017

That’s a bit ironic, given that it’s usually Twitter that’s doing the silencing.

Here are a few more from Dorsey’s tweet storm:

4/ Today we saw voices silencing themselves and voices speaking out because we’re *still* not doing enough.

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 14, 2017

6/ We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 14, 2017

7/ New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence.

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 14, 2017

Twitter has a history of unevenly applying rules. People on the left can tweet the most vile things without being suspended, while conservatives often seem to be singled out.

Early last year, Twitter announced the formation of a “Trust and Safety Council” to monitor abuse. The council has many very liberal groups as members, and no conservative groups. That rather skews what is viewed as offensive.

There seems to be a LOT of gray area in what could be interpreted as a hate group or “tweets that glorify violence.” A lot of people like to post pictures of themselves with guns — will the new Twitter KGB decide those are a glorification of violence? Given Twitter’s leftist bent and how ridiculous anti-gun progressives are, that’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Perhaps the rules will be less vague once officially rolled out. Twitter can still suspend or terminate the accounts of whomever it wants though. They did end up reversing themselves on the Marsha Blackburn video earlier this week, but that only came after they got a lot of negative publicity.