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June 11, 2016

Jonathan Weisman: Don’t Let The Door Hit You

Filed under: Censorship,Free Speech,Journalism — Patrick Durusau @ 10:44 am

Jonathan Weisman has decided to leave Twitter for reasons he sets forth (at length) at: Why I Quit Twitter — and Left Behind 35,000 Followers.

The essence of his complaint: Twitter failed to censor the speech of other Twitter users.

I offer no defense for the offensive and crude tweets Weisman received via Twitter.

However, as the The Times’s deputy Washington editor, Weisman had the resources to filter his Twitter stream to remove such posts on his own.

But avoiding the offensive tweets wasn’t his goal.

Weisman’s goal is to silence others and to enlist Twitter in that task.

I have to agree that Twitter’s use of its “terms of service” is arbitrary and capricious, not to mention lacking transparency, but that’s all the more reason to discard content rules from “terms of service,” not make them more onerous.

Weisman’s parting shot is to describe Twitter as a “…cesspoll of hate….”

Humanity has a number of such cesspools as well as large swaths of people who fall somewhere between there and sainthood. No reason to expect social media that reflects society to be any different.

Jonathan Weisman leaving Twitter is the loss of another advocate for censorship and there can never be too few of those.

PS: The New York Times needs to seriously think about why it employs a censorship advocate as its deputy Washington Editor.

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