BTR News: Twitter Taken To Task By European Officials Over Hate Tweets

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:08 — 1.1MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Amazon Music | iHeartRadio | Email | TuneIn | RSS | More

The social media sharing platform Twitter is being taken to task in Europe for allowing accounts that constantly tweet racist messages that are anti-Black, anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim. The tweets by offending accounts promote violence and intolerance and seemingly are against Twitter’s Terms of Service.

However, it seems that some want to make the issue about partisan politics and accuse Twitter of banning “conservatives” and tolerating the violence directed at conservative figures like Ajit Pai.

However, it isn’t a politically partisan issue when you can delete or block all accounts that violate terms of service, especially those that cross the line in promoting the violations of human rights based on race, gender, religion and national origin. Often the excuse in the United States brings up the 1st Amendment but the Bill Rights does not protect speech that seeks to deny the human rights of the targeted group and furthermore the intent of the 1st Amendment was to protect the freedom of religious expression and criticism of government officials. It does not protect threats of violence, racism, religious bigotry and xenophobia.

Twitter and Facebook both allow hate groups to operate on their platforms and Twitter just days ago sent out a notice platform-wide that instead of deleting or the blocking the accounts of those who promote symbolism related to white supremacy that instead they will post a warning message about such Tweets before another user sees them. This is similar to Facebook allowing racist hate groups to utilize the platform in secret groups.

This is exactly why the Black Talk Media Project in 2016 set up an ad-free social media platform called BTR Community to give our listeners a safe digital space that does not tolerate such activities. While we are not calling on people to boycott these platforms, perhaps it is the time that regular users stop spending so much time on the platforms. It seems absurd to even use terms like “Black Twitter” when Twitter is not run by non-white people and is run by people who tolerate violations of its terms of service under the guise of the 1st Amendment and free speech.