A request for Twitter

In the last few months I've seen some discussion on the exploitation of vulnerable aspects of twitter's rules by social justice warriors to silence political dissent by using bots to mass block or mass report so dissenters' accounts would be suspended. On October 29, I emailed press@twitter.com with questions, explaining my intent behind the request. I wanted to be up-front about the fact that this was for an article to ensure that their reply would consist of information they wanted known. 

Recent trends in some groups' tweets have included referencing the option included in the "block or report" menu to report another user for content that is "Generally offensive, disrespectful or in disagreement with my opinion." Some users are touting that option as a means to silence political dissent. This sounded unlike a social site policy, and led me to look further into the reporting options.

Further investigation has only led to more questions, including questions about other options for reporting. The help bubble for that option says "Twitter does not screen content and does not remove potentially offensive content unless such content is in violation of the Twitter Rules and Terms of Service," so I have read those.

Some of the twitter rules have wording which could be subject to broad interpretation and potential abuse. I'm writing to request clarification, as I am considering an article. My current focus is communication, harassment, censorship, and how twitter's rules affect engagement between users in relation to political and other potentially controversial discussions. Any information I receive in response to these questions will contribute to that article.

For instance, listed under "targeted abuse" are

• if the sole purpose of your account is to send abusive messages to others;

and

• if the reported behavior is one-sided or includes threats

What factors determine if the sole purpose of an account is to send abusive messages to others?

Is disagreement with others' opinion considered an abusive message, and if so does that mean engaging in debate by replying to publicly made statements of opinion with counterarguments is now considered abuse?
If not, what is the specific reason for including "in disagreement with my opinion" in the harassment reporting options?

I am assuming that tweets without @user mentions are not considered "targeted" because they do not involve intentional contact and users can block feed they do not want to see. Is this correct?

Does "targeted abuse" include @user mentions without abusive language, but which contain a dissenting counterargument to something the user has said? (eg. I disagree with @twitteruser's stated opinion in LinkToPublication because reason #politicalorsocialconcept or @twitteruser I disagree with what you said.) If so, is that a blanket rule or does the behavior have to be repeated or continue after the user engaging in it has received some variation of "stop talking to me" before it is considered to be in violation?

Does the tone of a tweet change whether it is considered abusive, and if so what is the criteria for that? ("I disagree with what you said" vs a similar line containing expletives vs a line containing slurs or the suggestion that the user deserves to suffer violence because of his opinion.)

Under the Spam heading are the following criteria:

• If you have followed and/or unfollowed large amounts of users in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive following or follower churn);

When a political or social movement forms on twitter, users often follow each other so that posts about their specific pet issue will show up in their feed. Is it a goal of twitter to prevent this, or does following require automated means in order to be considered a violation?

• If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;

Many users post links to news stories, videos, and memes related to hashtags created for issues and concepts that have meaning to them. Very often these are, to the user, personal updates because they are new information about the issue or concept. Will users whose personal updates usually include links to information be considered spammers?

• If a large number of people are blocking you;
• If a large number of spam complaints have been filed against you;

This looks like it could be used by ideological groups to silence popular or very vocal users whose updates contain statements of opinion to which they are opposed, by banding together to all block and/or report the same person, thereby putting him or her in violation. What is twitter's administration doing to counter potential abuse of these rules?

• If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #, trending or popular topic, or promoted trend;

There are Twitter users currently interpreting this to mean that dissenting views to a hashtag's political outlook and criticism of the belief or assertion behind a hashtag can be considered spam if it is posted to the hashtag. For example, posting an opposing viewpoint with a political hashtag can offend the readers of the hashtag, but it's a discussion attempt. Is it considered spam even if it is not belligerent or threatening?

• Randomly or aggressively following, favoriting or Retweeting Tweets;

This line is hard to interpret. Can you please give a more detailed explanation of what it means? How does twitter determine when following, favoriting, and retweeting are random or aggressive, and when doing those things is acceptable?

Finally, do you have a policy in place to deal with habitual, vexatious false flagging (users repeatedly reporting content which does not violate rules or terms of service in an attempt to silence speech they disapprove or people they dislike)? This is a behavior I've seen on other social networking sites where administrators have written and posted broadly interpretable policy without stipulating that false exploitation of it would also lead to discipline. What is Twitter doing to prevent users from banding together to engage in this type of harassment, and how do you differentiate between a user engaging in this and a user who spots or experiences and reports a lot of genuine violations?

If you provide me with a statement on the overall goal of Twitter's rules and guidelines as they relate to discussion on the site, I will include that in the article.

If you have any questions for me, please let me know, and I'll be happy to clarify anything that has not come across clearly. Thank you in advance for taking the time to address these questions. I hope to produce an article that will bring about better understanding of Twitter's rules and their relationship to the many discussions among users of the site.

To date I have not heard back. I cannot be sure if this is simply due to their staff for handling press requests being small and unable to keep up, or if they are avoiding answering the question. Even if it is the latter, it could be because, now that they realize there are holes in their policy they want to fix them before replying. It could also be due to a desire to leave those holes in place without having to answer for them. The only way to know would be to hear back from twitter, and that is out of my control. 

Flaws in the logic of feminist "victim blaming" accusations

The "victim blaming" myth of feminism's "rape culture" theory is based on combining a logical fallacy called affirming the consequent with a type of circular reasoning called Begging the Question . Affirming the consequent is an argument in which the individual assumes that if one factor results from another, it can also be used to prove the other, when one is not discussing bi-conditional factors (either/or) but factors for which there can be variables. Begging the question is an argument based on the assumption that its own conclusion is true.

Begging the question
The link contains extensive discussion. It explains circular reasoning thus:

To beg the question is to assume something that you have no right to assume. What don't you have a right to assume? The conclusion itself, obviously, or any proposition that is just the conclusion stated in different words. Clearly, to use any argument in which the conclusion is also one of the premisses is to reason in a circle: reasoning from the premisses to the conclusion brings you back to where you started.

Feminist "victim blaming" accusations start with two wrongful assumptions.

First, feminists assume that the individual under discussion is a victim (feminists label incidents "rape"  whether their assigned "victim" agrees with them or not). This includes circumstances where the female they want to label "victim" has actively engaged in consensual sex and later regretted it for any reason, even when the "victim" doesn't feel victimized. An example of the practical application of feminist ideological advocacy on this is university responses; my daughter has been taught at her university that any alcohol consumption at all negates a woman's ability to consent to sex. That, when combined with the campus SaVE act, indicates that if a regularly sexually active heterosexual couple has sex after the two of them have each consumed a single drink, and someone (it doesn't have to be the girl) makes a complaint against the guy, he may be considered guilty of rape, expelled from school, and barred from attending other universities in the state. Further, the censure would be reflected on his academic record, and could influence legal proceedings on the matter.

Second, feminists assume that a "victim's" interest in exercising her own agency to control her risk level is automatically unreasonable and therefore a dysfunction. This argument extends to treating anything women do outside of feminist-led organizational advisement as a sign of "self-blame," whether it's an effective means of self-defense or not. These groups protest the idea that women and girls should be encouraged to learn and use self-defense, then obtain government and other grant funding to teach self-defense to recovering victims. Not only is that a conflict of interest (feminist organizations profit from convincing women that they can't defend themselves without feminists' approval,) it's self-contradictory. Either attempting to control one's risk level is always an irrational, dysfunctional response to danger, or it's sometimes not - even if doing so is not under the controlled guidance of feminist ideology. 

With these in mind, feminist "logic" proceeds by labeling women's regret of their own choices preceding or during a sexual encounter "self-blame." Both assumptions are articulated for the purpose of labeling discussion on rape prevention "victim blaming."  One cannot argue in debate that women have the right or responsibility to exercise mindful awareness the same as is expected of men without being accused of victim blaming. One cannot differentiate between an act of contravening a person's right to refuse intimate contact and a sexual encounter that is later regretted by one party or the other without being accused of victim blaming.

Affirming the consequent
The example in the link uses several scenarios. I want to look for a minute at just the first two.

1) If Bill Gates owns Fort Knox, then he is rich.
2) Bill Gates is rich.
3) Therefore, he owns Fort Knox.

The fallacy is obvious in that example. That one is rich isn't necessarily an indication of what specific things one owns. It's simply a measure of one's overall wealth. It's less obvious in the second, as we often "diagnose" ourselves based on past experience. This is a much more common mistake.

1) If I have the flu, then I have a sore throat.
2) I have a sore throat.
3) Therefore, I have the flu.

This often takes the form of "Last time I had symptom X, I was diagnosed with Y. I have symptom X again, so it must be Y again.

As the factors appear more related or the issue becomes more clouded with additional steps (such as past experience) or ideology, it becomes easier for the mind to disguise that mistake as a reasonable course of thought. The flaws in in the "logic" behind feminist claims of victim blaming are similarly clouded by combining two different fallacies to reach a flawed conclusion, but once you see them, they're glaringly obvious.

The flaw begins with "If a trauma makes the victim feel helpless and afraid, then the victim will adopt behaviors to try to gain control over future circumstances to avoid experiencing the trauma again." Feminists insert "begging the question" twice between what would be steps 1 and 2 in order to impose the victim label. This expands the flaw to 5 steps and clouds it enough to hide the flaw from most individuals.

1) If a trauma makes the victim feel helpless and afraid, then the victim will adopt behaviors to try to gain control over future circumstances to avoid experiencing the trauma again.

• Trauma such as combat conditions sometimes leads to (Post Traumitc Stress Disorder) PTSD.
  One of the symptoms of PTSD is the sufferer's tendency to blame himself for conditions he could not control, and to adopt behaviors to try to gain a measure of control over those conditions. Since the conditions can't be controlled, those behaviors focus on what can mitigate their impact. This is why war vets in your circle of friends and family may be unable to sit with their backs exposed to unseen approach. One cannot control what another person is going to do, but one can influence one's ability to see it coming.
  Another is to attribute significance to conditions which don't affect the outcome of a situation, and adopt behaviors to control those conditions. That's not a tendency that is unique to stress disorders; having a lucky item without which you feel more vulnerable to misfortune is an example.
  Another is to (out of stress-trained habit) apply defensive responses which are necessary in frequently, unpredictably violent circumstances to ordinarily peaceful situations. An example of this is when a vet is triggered to respond in self-defense or even with panic when there is a loud noise that's similar to the noise he experienced during combat.

That's established from treatment of war vets who suffer from PTSD following tours of duty in which they faced conditions of life-threatening violence.

• Rape can be a traumatic experience.

That's established from evaluation of female victims of violent rape. It's also established that rape victims can have similar PTSD responses. However, feminists misuse both the term rape and the term PTSD, applying them to circumstances that don't merit either one.

2) Begging the question; assuming victimization, as described above.

3) Begging the question; assuming that mindful behavior is dysfunction if sexual violence is at issue, also described above.

4) The (person we labeled) victim has adopted behaviors to avoid revisiting a regretted or upsetting experience.

Because feminists have already applied the label "rape" whether the female's ability to refuse was contravened or she now regrets a conscious choice to consent, they fall right into affirming the consequent.

5) The (person we labeled) victim must be traumatized and responding to feelings of helplessness and fear 

This leads to the assertion that discussion on women's power to take control over any factors surrounding incidents feminists want to call rape (which include rape, but also include regretted consensual sex acts) is victim blaming and therefore verboten. That is how feminists argue that being upset about a sexual encounter makes it rape regardless of what happened during the encounter, and use "victim blaming" as a thought-terminating cliche to stifle rational discussion on the topic. 

Their argument is invalid in several places.

• That the discussion is about rape and not some other area of risk does not change what is and what is not a reasonable expectation of personal responsibility for one's own safety. Feminists argue as if it does.
  
• The presumption that assuming control over your environment is automatically unreasonable is bullshit. That something can be stretched to an unreasonable level (for example, never wearing red because you were wearing red when you got shot) does not make responses to one's environment (for example, wearing your seat-belt because you know that an impact could send you through the windshield without it) unreasonable.
  
• The presumption that a sexual choice regretted by a woman indicates that she was raped is also bullshit. Humans regularly make decisions we regret without being told that since we regret the decision, it must have been imposed on us from the outside. Force, coercion, or incapacitation are ways of imposing. When an individual simply makes a bad decision, it's not imposed, and it's not unreasonable to feel responsible instead of victimized. A woman who did something while drunk that when sober she realizes was a bad idea is not the victim that a woman who was raped while passed out or unresponsive would be.
  
• The consequent doesn't prove the antecedent. Assuming responsibility for factors under one's control which can affect the outcome of a circumstance is not necessarily an illegitimate conclusion, even when not all of the factors one encountered in said circumstance were under one's control. Changing one's behavior to avoid the consequences of a bad decision is not automatically dysfunctional choice that indicates trauma. It's also a sign of learning. To qualify as an irrational response to trauma, that change must be unproductive as a means of improving one's situation with respect to risk, or so burdensome that its drawbacks outweigh its benefits.
  

Don't allow feminist debaters to use a logical fallacy to pressure you into adopting a belief in something they haven't proved exists or occurs. The existence of the factors under discussion; rape, trauma, post traumatic stress disorder, and feminist-led therapy, do not automatically lead to the conclusion that the rape culture of feminist imagining is a real thing. To demonstrate that, they need to connect those factors with logic in a way that does not rely on baseless assumptions.