Twitter’s New Tool to Crack Down on Politically Incorrect Language – Heat Street

Twitter has launched a new way to punish users for bad behavior, temporarily limiting their account.

Some users are receiving notices their accounts are limited for 12 hours, meaning only people who follow them can see their tweets or receive notifications. When they are retweeted, people outside their network cant see those retweets.

Some speculate these limitations are automatic based on keywords, but there is no hard evidence.

This would be fine if this was used uniformly to clamp down on harassment, but it appears to be used on people, simply for using politically incorrect language.

Take for example the Twitter user @Drybones5 who got hisaccount limited after using the word retarded.

He claims he got his account limited directly after saying retarded twice. The first time he called a Nintendo policy adding paid extra content to their new Zelda game retarded.

The next time he called someone a retard who called him a retard first.

Another user @faggotfriday (kind of surprising he hasnt gotten banned yet) got his account limited after using fag in the British sense, meaning cigarette.

Another user claims his account was limited after calling Senator John McCain a traitor.

Its not surprising or unreasonable, the limiting feature would be applied to the n-word, but it can go into effect even when the word isused in a context which was not targeting anyone.

In this case the n-word was used in reference to a statement Chris Cuomo made. It seems that using the n-word inreference to a quote could cause an account to get limited.

Twitter appearsto be using this feature to police problematic language that is not necessarily targeted harassment.So much for being the free speech wing of the free speech party.

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Twitter's New Tool to Crack Down on Politically Incorrect Language - Heat Street