It’s our belief that we are entitled under the First Amendment to respond to our users’ concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing information about the scope of U.S. government surveillance – including what types of legal process have not been received. We should be free to do this in a meaningful way, rather than in broad, inexact ranges.
So, today, we have filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to publish our full Transparency Report, and asking the court to declare these restrictions on our ability to speak about government surveillance as unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is already considering the constitutionality of the non-disclosure provisions of the NSL law later this week.
Good move by Twitter.
I agree with what Twitter is doing but I think at this point we can mostly assume that the government is given fairly open access to most data available to Twitter.
Also, people online and twitter are often cruel. One example is a youtube game commenter TotalBiscuit who had a breakdown and posted this to reddit once: http://www.reddit.com/r/Cynicalbrit/comments/1xrx27/in_light_of_tb_…
>I’ve read so many people with their “advice”, oh… you should get a thicker skin! You should just ignore it! Those people have no idea of the volume of it all, or how constant it is, it never stops, it’s day in day out 24/7, no end in sight noise. So many people talking at once… It’s death by a thousand cuts. That thick skin isn’t invincible.
Thing about Twitter is that people are constantly complaining about being harassed on there and that Twitter the company is not doing anything about it. Yet people still continue to use Twitter, which defies all logic. It’s like the people who bitch day in and day out about how bad Facebook is, but still have an account there. Listen, if you’re looking for an alternative to Twitter, check out this little thing called RSS. If anything important happens on Twitter, it’ll be in your RSS feed in 30 minutes or less. Are you really THAT Much in a hurry to consume the news?
As for the quoted comment:
I am one of those ‘you should grow a thicker skin’ people, and I am very well aware of how constant the harassment is. It just goes with the territory. It’s like if you want to be a big time celebrity, the paparazzi is going to hound you endlessly. Yeah I know it sucks, but if you can’t stand the heat, you REALLY should get out of the kitchen, which was eventually what I did. I’m like, ‘I’m not getting paid for this shit, so you lamers can suck it
‘ If I’d been doing it for a living, I probably would’ve stuck in there.
But my point is that lamers have been lamers and harassing people for at least a decade and a half, and now we’re all suddenly supposed to care because feminists are complaining about it? Welcome to our world, ladies. Unfortunately, it ain’t always pretty.
Edited 2014-10-08 21:00 UTC
Oh all right. People who dislike vile mobs trying to harass them to silence should just STFU. Idiot.
Because these ‘vile mobs’ didn’t exist before the feminists caught their attention? They didn’t have Internet accounts and/or didn’t bother anyone up until a few months ago?
It’s more like women are being exposed to the same nimrods that men have been putting up with for at least 15 years, except nobody gave a shit when WE bitched about it. I was first targeted around 1996; the delivery mechanisms were different and the reasons were different, but it was still the same group of morons who love to make life miserable for everyone else. (Instead of threatening to rape me, they threatened to rape my mother/sister/etc.)
But now, these poor women, who wish to be treated as equals, are having to deal with it, and suddenly it’s this horrible problem that we need to fix right now. It’s the Internet, there are lamers on the Internet, so deal with it. That is what we have been told all this time, but now the message is different because the person on the receiving end has a vagina? I’m not seeing what’s ‘equal’ about that. And frankly, I’m a little offended. ‘Oh, but it’s different when it happens to a woman…’ Yeah, it’s always different when it’s a special interest group pretending to fight for so-called equality. Where were these f-king feminists (and the white knights that jumped to their defense) when I, along with many others, were getting death threats?
I’m hoping that next, they’ll start complaining about the spam and sexually explicit solicitations they receive in their inbox, then maybe Thom will post a rant every other day about the horrible spam problem, and the misogynists who are sending it out.
Edited 2014-10-08 23:27 UTC
You’re full of shit. First of all, the internet is extremely different these days, with social media enabled stalking, than it was back when Usenet was the only way to troll. In other words, you’re a liar.
Second, feminists have suffered from the same kind of attacks since they were called suffragettes. It’s not new. Not sudden. It is, however, much more prevalent for women than for men, and the attacks tend to be much worse.
So I guess you weren’t on IRC back then, or didn’t have an email address? And anyway, WTF difference does it make HOW they’re harassing you? Does a death threat only count when they send it on Twitter? Or is it only if they send it to a woman?
So much love all around. Seriously, are people that bored these days ? Not enough books to read, radio broadcast to listen to, tv shows to watch, libraries to learn from, open countries to discover abroad, music to perform, paints to draw, applications to program, … ?
Nope, it’s all about hate, ever, everywhere, every time.
*yawn*
Kochise
Your equivocation doesn’t hide your misogyny, it puts it on display. What you’re talking about is called cyber bullying. It’s kid’s stuff. It’s also been taken seriously for more than a decade.
This comment got voted a 5? Weird.
Better handling of cyber bullying / Internet stalking or whatever you call it against women must also apply to men or it isn’t equal.
Calling for women to be treated equally is hardly misogyny. Do you even know what that word means? What about equivocation? Because I don’t think you used that one properly either.
It’s equivocation because he pretends this is about women demanding special treatment when it isn’t. It’s misogyny because he pretends that’s what women need.
Cyber bullying is about private communication or small communities, this is about attempts at disruption of public speech.
15 years ago is the year 2000 and the Internet wasn’t much different then than it is now.
Facebook and Twitter weren’t around. Not even Myspace quite yet. But AOL and Compuserv still had people getting harassed. And there was email, newsgroups and IRC which aren’t functionally much different from Twitter.
In 1993 stupid college kids would write scripts to flood email people they didn’t like, wait until someone left a terminal unlocked and run them from the other guy’s account.
Yeah, it isn’t like any of this is new.
Ever watch an NBA basketball game in person with good seats? They trash talk each other through out the game, and fans join in as well. The only way to stay sane, is to develop selective hearing. To understand that you are the only one in control of how you feel, and random insults from random people can’t succeed in bothering you or distracting you from your appointed task.
Some people are really good at ignoring that noise, and some are not. Seriously, there have been great athletes that were simply harassed into being terrible at what they’ve spent their lifetime practicing on.
Its not an acknowledgment that harassment is ok, or should be tolerated. But if you want to survive in an environment where its common, and/or fight it, its an essential coping skill.