Elon Lost The Spam Wars To ‘Pussy In Bio’ Spam
from the spam-in-bio dept
Forget Mars colonies and self-driving cars. Elon Musk’s greatest challenge yet? Defeating Twitter’s relentless ‘pussy in bio’ spam army. And let’s just say, it’s not going well.
It has really been quite incredible to watch Elon rediscover some of the basics of trust & safety best practices (though while consistently messing it up) as ExTwitter just gets worse and worse. Before he had even taken over Twitter, he insisted he had two priorities: stopping spam and restoring free speech. Of course, some of us pointed out that those two things were in conflict.

Spam fighting is a core part of trust & safety, but Elon insisted that he knew better, fired basically everyone with any knowledge on the subject, and then repeatedly suggested that he had figured out how to solve it, only to see spam get worse and worse on ExTwitter, to the point that users are getting really frustrated.

Most recently, the spam has been in the form of posts with the following, or some variation on this: “░M░Y░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░.” It’s been so unavoidable on ExTwitter that it’s become a meme.
John Herrman, over at New York Mag’s Intelligencer, has a ridiculously long investigation determining who is behind all that spam (basically a company doing the modern equivalent of an old phone sex line). But the reason the article caught my attention was that Herrman kicks off the article by highlighting Elon’s evolution on fighting spam. It’s kinda glorious:
If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying,” wroteElon Musk in May 2022. “The bots are in for a surprise tomorrow,” he threatened shortly after the purchase closed. A new subscription service, he claimed, would “destroy the bots” with his new “anti-bot bots.” In 2023, the threat seemed to evolve. “We’re trying hard to stop bots & trolls on this platform,” he wrote in July. “Fighting bot and troll farms is hard,” he conceded. “The bot wars continue,” he posted in an August update. January of this year brought a shift in tone: “Bots are the devil (sigh).” In March, more signals of an extended, brutal campaign: “Stopping crypto/porn spam bots is not easy, but we’re working on it.”
Yeah, so, that was kinda the point of my old speed run post. One of the things that you often learn regarding trust & safety is that there are often good reasons why things are done, even if the end results are messy, and assuming you can magically do better with none of the experience or understanding of the tradeoffs means you’re going to make a ton of mistakes.
Now, it’s no surprise that Musk has failed to stop spam on the platform. Or even that it’s gotten significantly worse of a problem. Content moderation at scale remains impossible to do well.
But, you know, Musk might have done a better job if he hadn’t fired everyone at the company who actually understood how to fight spam and replaced them with his own highly misguided “intuition” on where the spam was coming from. Content moderation is a constant struggle, and spam is a part of that. If Musk could reflect for just one moment, it might be nice if he realized how stupidly over confident he was that he would be able to solve it. And also, how wrong he was to insist that the previous management wasn’t taking the issue seriously.
Filed Under: content moderation, elon musk, expertise, pussy in bio, spam, trust & safety
Companies: twitter, x
Last chance! Support our fundraiser today and 



Comments on “Elon Lost The Spam Wars To ‘Pussy In Bio’ Spam”
Star Trek II
There’s a scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Kirk and Spock quietly talk about the prefix codes and Saavik is perplexed. Ignoring the rather silly level of protection (a 5 digit number), I always liked what Kirk says here. He says to Saavik, “You’ve got to learn why things work on a Starship.”
When you’re not an expert, you need to first check with those who are to find out why things work the way they do because there’s probably a good reason. Now, if no one can tell you why, and this certainly does happen with a lot of frequency, then you can decide to do things differently, but always check first.
Re:
Also, unless Twitter did a much better job documenting its code and practices than most other rapidly-growing startups do, a whole lot of knowledge was probably lost forever during Elon’s little post-purchase firing spree.
Trying to revamp the anti-spam code gets a lot harder if most of the people familiar with the existing code are gone.
Re: Re:
Yeah, he had zero idea of what half the people he fired actually did, and publicly fired people who tried informing him. He’s also not paying the people he fired so there’s no good will, and that takes care of about 80% of documentation in my experience. A decent tech can work out how things are set up, but the quirks of why are now outside of the company.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re:
It’s for kids.
Grow up.
Re: Re:
Your pussy?
Re: Re: Re:
My pussy in bio (a Ceylon, FYI).
In Elon’s case, it’s simple. He’s a self-centered, self-entitled chode, with money, surrounded by a collection of fanbois that would never wash their hair, if he personally shit on them.
Re:
If E.L.O.N were to get rid of all the bots on twitter, there’d be nobody left to agree with his posts.
Re: Re:
Phrased that wrong. Ahem.
If E.L.O.N were to get rid of all the bots on twitter, there’d be nobody left that agrees with his posts.
Re: Re: Re:
The implication that even his simps don’t even want to sign up for an eXtwitter account is funny.
Musk never understood Twitter or its problems
I live in Las Vegas. Twitter was an invaluable tool during the October 1, 2017, shooting, allowing us to see exactly what was happening in real time, and making sure our friends were okay. UNLV even has a massive data collection of tweets related to the shooting, showing Twitter’s value and how different people used it.
On November 6 of last year, there was another shooting, this time at UNLV. I have friends who work there, and so immediately went to Twitter for real-time updates on what was happening. All I saw — from accounts with checkmarks, natch — was obvious spam (sometimes with thousands of upvotes), conspiracy theories, and some Nazi bullsh1t thrown in. Of course, it’s no longer possible to collect tweets without paying thousands of dollars, so no one can afford to study how completely the two examples differ. How convenient.
The truth is that Elon never understood how people used Twitter. He thought everyone used it like him: to troll people and follow celebrities. The loss of verified accounts removed any real usefulness, and Elon’s actions encouraging bots and spammers put a bullet in its head.
There is no replacement for real-time news, and there likely never will be. Mastadon, et al., will never have enough users for this.
Thanks, Elon. GFY.
Re:
I have doubts that he understands people in general.
░L░M░A░O░
“Am I so out of touch?”
“No. It’s the T&S team who are wrong!”
There's also one teeny tiny other problem...
Sacrificial employee: Sir, we’ve identified a swarm of bot accounts!
Elon: Excellent, you’ve taken care of them I assume?
Sacrificial employee: About that… all of them are verified, and over half of them liked your recent post.
Elon: Those are valued users on our platform and shall not be bothered. Now see yourself out and on the way tell the rest of your former team to get back to work cracking down on the actual bot problem, the ones that’s aren’t paying me or kissing my ass!
He’s spending too much time being the pussy in everyone’s bio.
Re:
That’s insulting to both cats and vulvas.
So you mean the 1400 followers I got yesterday, all really attractive and scantily clad women, weren’t following for my charm? Damn, ruin a guy’s ego.
Well, the second option is still open.
Re:
The managerial we is the opposite of the royal we. The drones can overwork themselves to death trying to address the issue, and Elon will continue to take in tons of money for making things worse.
Re: Re: not a sure bet
I am not so sure of that. Reports are that some advertisers are cutting back, and real user counts are declining. ALso, it appears that the over all cash flow is such that Xitter cannot pay the money they agreed to pay some folks who left.
I think there were also some landlords who were not being kept current. Also I think he shut down at least one of the server sites.
As a result of such rumors, my guess is that Elon may not so much rake it in, as shovel it out.
On the one hand, I feel sort of sorry for people who actually enjoyed using Twitter in the pre-Musk era.
On the other hand, watching Musk burn his money in an ongoing dumpster fire has been sort of enjoyable. He’s living proof that “rich” and “smart” aren’t synonyms.
Re:
Elon Musk could’ve kept his mouth shut and stayed in the good graces of American culture/society by being a slightly eccentric billionaire with a penchant for funding space rockets. But he wanted to be the center of attention so badly that he effectively exposed himself as a drug-abusing right-wing weirdo with a huge case of Dunning-Krueger Syndrome who makes “we should replace CEOs with AIs” sound like a great idea. Now that’s comedy.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Well, people with experience wrote and abided by the constitution for many years in this country, and then the NDAA destroyed all of the previous experience and wisdom that people had. Now the entire government from the local to the federal level and many sectors can be convicted for high crimes, treason, organized crime, Seditious Conspiracy to Violate Constitutional Rights of the Established Authority – We the People, the Qualified Electors, the Sovereign Citizens, and now America is a third rate third world shithole lawless banana bureaucracy failed state caste system, kleptocracy.
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Re:
Please go advocate for a fascist dictatorship elsewhere, you Plagiarized Information Synthesis System.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
What in the hell is the matter with you? Firstly, I abhore fascism, secondly, I have not plagiarized anyone. Why in the hell would you say that I plagiarized Synthesis Systems, what ever that is? If you are accusing me of that for some reason, then they must have pkagiarized me!
Re: Re: Re:
How long have you felt that way about they must have pkagiarized me?
Re: Re: Re:
You “abhor” fascism so much that the only time you’re in the comments is to Stan for fascists.
Pkagiarized, indeed.
Re: Re: Re:
FTFY. YW.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
Fascists in government, healthcare/mental healthcare, and surveillancestate/tech sector have been torturing, terrorizing, and illegally enslaving me, gaslighting me, and vandalizing and stealing my property, for over ten years in this particular round and there have been other rounds, and they murdered my parents, my brother, and my dog. I hate fascists.
Re: Re: Re:
Yeah, sure. Black is white. Up is down. You hate fascists despite consistently Stanning for them.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:2
Who are the fascist individuals do you think that I am stanning for?
Re: Re: Re:3
For starters, you opposing Ukrainian aid is more indicative of stanning for Putin, Mussolini Timecube.
Your other unhinged nonsense seems to be indicative of you stanning for the insurrection-in-chief, Trump.
Re: Re: Re:4
In this case, I’m more inclined to think that he’s just not been taking his meds.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:4
Ha Ha. No. I hate Trump after what he did to this country. Fake covid-19 virus fake pandemic. I think that he is the devil. A totally evil moster. Extremely sadistic man.
Re: Re: Re:5
he’s also the one that cuased the jan 6 insurrection
Re: Re: Re:3
Trump, Putin, DeSantis…
Re: Re: Re:
Tell me more about this dream you had.
Re: Re: Re:
You hate yourself? Explains a lot.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
It isn’t plagiarism if you inadvertently forget to cite your sources. Just ask Mike and all the academics defending Gay.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:
Why is this hidden?
I can quote if you like.
Re: Re: Re:2
Er, read again.
Re: Re: Re:
“…nonsense peddlers of the grifter class found examples of what they called plagiarism, but which many academics felt were inadvertent errors in weak paraphrasing, or inadvertent failure to properly cite sources.”
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/27/bill-ackmans-wife-sends-hilarious-misleading-defamation-threat-letter-to-business-insider-that-confirms-bill-ackman-is-a-censorial-hypocrite/
If we don’t need to cite sources, don’t ask for links
Re:
And you produce this word salad in support of ending free and fair elections.
Fucking dolt.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
No. I oppose electing people that commit high crimes, treason, organized crime, crimes against humanity, seditious conspiracy to vio,ate constitutional rights, and tbat are controlled by lobbtpyists. If that is the type of person that you want to elect, I would like to hear your explanation for it, because those are the choices tbat are on the table.
Shit on rye bread
Shite on white bread
Shit on whole wheat bread
Shit on pumoernickel
Shit on our dough bread
Who in the hell wants to eat a shit sandwich regardless of what kind of bread its on?
Re: Re: Re:
So, you oppose electing Donald Trump for an inconsecutive second term/dictator for life?
Re: Re: Re:
Let me know when Biden does any of that. Also, you’ve supported people who have done those things.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:2
When i had supoorted people that had done those things in the past, i was not aware that they were doing them since the media and academic sectors do such a bang up job of concealing it from the public.
Re:
You’re a sovereign citizen that waffle?
That really clears things up quite a bit.
Elon, I’m clearly not the business genius you are but you should redirect x.com to xxx.com, at this stage, I’m pretty sure you’ll pleased more bot/spammer/troll and even regular users.
(Note: I haven’t dare to visit on any of theses two websites.)
The irony is that it isn't a particularly hard problem
Those of us who’ve studied this issue for a long time knew that Musk’s approach was never going to work and we knew approaches that would work. And we said so.
And very predictably Musk ignored us, the experts, in favor of his own hunches and whims…and just as with the Cybertruck, this methodology ensured that the outcome would be a miserable, laughable failure.
It’s going to get worse: spam is one of those problems that always expands to fill any space it’s allowed to occupy, because spammers are perfectly willing to destroy a profitable ecosystem…as long as they manage to extract the last dollar from it before it collapses. Anyone/everyone who’s invested in Twitter should be made aware of this, and encouraged to get out now before it devalues more than it already has.
Re:
What do you mean by “isn’t a particularly hard problem”? Spam is one of those cat and mouse games which will never be quite completely solved. But yes, there are better approaches to combatting spam than others. The Trust and Safety team that Elon Musk tossed knew some of the better approaches.
Re: Re:
What I mean is that there are people on the Internet who have been studying spam since before the slang term “spam” was even coined. (Various other terms were used before we coalesced on that one.) There are a lot of rather effective techniques whose application depends on the situation: some work for email, some for Usenet, some for web forums, some for all of them. None of those techniques are perfect, but used judiciously in combination they’re effective, scalable, hard to game, predictable, and debuggable. (That last point is important because mistakes are inevitable.)
We told the old Twitter T&S team about these too and they largely ignored us, for the same reason that Facebook T&S ignored us: profit. More users == higher stock valuation, and it doesn’t matter if those users are fake/spambots. But now that the surviving T&S team has been retasked with the single mission of insulating Musk’s fragile ego from criticism, it’s not even worth trying to communicate with them. They can’t admit that they have a problem, not publicly, not privately, not ever.
The bottom line is that while this isn’t a perfectly-solved problem in operations, it’s a rather well-solved problem, and the people who’ve paid attention have reduced it (in their operations) to a sporadic annoyance. Other people have, unfortunately, chosen not to pay attention and well, the result looks like Twitter.
Re: Re: Re:
I’m following up my own comment because a great example of an effective technique has just presented itself in real time.
One of my spamtraps just received a message from a domain called “protrumpnews.com”. The sending system is 192.107.243.105, mta4.america.protrumpnews.com. The “mta” part is a common hostname string that means “Mail Transport Agent” and is indicative of a mail server. That IP address is in a block of 256 addresses (a /24 in CIDR terms) that belongs to something calling itself Psyclone Media. The spam payload is a bunch of pro-Trump propaganda — and an ad/link to MyPillow.
Also in that /24 are a lot of other mta* hostnames in domains like survivalisttimes.com, theepochtimes.com, maga.black, stopworldcontrol.com, etc. – so what we have here is either a front that doesn’t really exist or a dedicated spamming operation catering to right-wing/cult organizations. So while I could block that single host or that single domain, that would be foolish…because I’m just going to have to do it again and again as they crank out spam runs from more of these hosts/domains. Yet this is EXACTLY what a lot of people do, and then they wonder why their methods are ineffective.
So I didn’t do that. I just firewalled the entire /24, which means that nothing on that network can reach my mail servers, i.e. they can’t even attempt to deliver spam.
And when I’m done writing this I’m going to check to see if “Psyclone Media” controls any other networks, and I’m going to firewall those too. And then I’m going to spread the word so that my operational contacts can – if they wish – do the same thing.
This is how you decisively stop spam. You don’t fool around with half measures: once you identify an obvious/dedicated source, you deal with it effectively and then you probably won’t have to ever deal with it again.
Re: Re: Re:2
I wish I could get a firewall that lets me block by ASN, honestly.
Re:
Who needs recovery points anyway?
Re: probably too late
That might make sense if there were still a market in Twitter/Xitter stock. However, I think it has been removed from the stock exchanges so that now you or an agent have to find someone gullible enough to give you money.
Elon is not a good mark, because he already had to borrow a great lot of money in order to close the purchase and take the company private. And many other investors will prefer to invest in things which have positive cash flows.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Why do comments get flagged by the community?
Re:
If you hover your mouse over the flag button text pops up explaining what it does “Flag this comment as abusive/trolling/spam” The fact that a lot of your comments get flagged to the point they get hidden seems to imply that a lot of your comments contain abuse, trolling, or spam content. You have a few non-exclusive options you could take from here, but I would bet money on you going all in on option 3;
1) be introspective and review all your past comments to find the common themes in the ones that get flagged and try to figure out what is being judged by this community as abuse, trolling, or spam so you can avoid those approaches in the future.
2) review the replies to your comments where the community basically tells you repeatedly what the problems and avoid them in the future
3) play the victim, do/change nothing, and/or whine about how things are not fair for you.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
I am under attack by hackers. Hackers prevent me from seeing most things on the internet. They will not even let me visit standard websites. It started with Wikioedia being the first site that I could not visit, and I have never written anything on Wkikipedia, I only eard, then yourube, which .i have never had any video if myself on ever, then it just kept going. I can’t even access the NYT, WaPo, CNBC, or most standard websites. I have bought and replaced technology over and over again. The technology sucks. The products are Lemons. I have installed the best firewalls available too. It is just that the technology sucks. Considering that the major tech companies, government, banks, and retailers have also been hacked, the fact is tbat the technology sucks and it us all Lemons. If Bill Gates cannot prevent people from hacking Microsoft, then that is just ridiculous to think that anyone that uses it is doing something wrong and it is their fault if it does not work.
Re: Re: Re:
You went with Option 3. You chose…poorly.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:2
It is not an option that I chose. Hackers are preventing me from choosing options 1 & 2. Wouldn’t that work out great for the psychos if I just shut uo and didn’t complain about their shitty lemon products and narrative of lies while they are committing high crimes, treason, organized crime, crimes against humanity, and seditious conspiracy to violate constitutional rights.
Re: Re: Re:3
Please don’t insult our intelligence with these kinds of lies.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:4
You do not sound intelligent at all and I am nit lying.
Re: Re: Re:5
[Projects facts contrary to all evidence]
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:6
I showed the Grafton WI police when trying to connect to a standard site. The police witnessed it. They did nithing, like every other time that I reported crime being committed against me or the country with the fake virus and fake vacvines. They are security guards for organized crime rings.
Re: Re: Re:5
Your claims are rather hard to believe, and you’ve given no evidence or reason to believe you. But even if you’re not lying, a) what do you expect us to do about it, b) why should we help you, and c) what does this have to do with anything?
Re: Re: Re:5
FTFY. YW.
Re: Re: Re:3
And you chose to harass Techdirt over actually learning how to fix your problems.
You truly earned the name Mussolini Timecube.
And I, for one, wish you’d shut the fuck up.
Re: Re: Re:3
If that was true, you wouldn’t be able to choose option 3 either. That’s not how anything works. If you are able to read and reply to others’ comments, there is nothing preventing you from viewing your own or their past replies.
First, repeating nonsense like this is part of why you keep getting flagged.
Second, you haven’t demonstrated any of those claims to be true.
Third, how is that even relevant?
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:4
You are incorrect on claiming that if hackers are preventing me from visting some websites, that they are going to prevent me from visiting other websites. It is just part of their torture and terrorism. They have a Taliban mentality and want women to be oblivious to what is going on. If this site is managed by a different server than theirs, maybe they just don’t know how to get into this websites server yet to prevent me from connecting to it. I don’t know what the explanation for it is. I am not a techie. But that is just a guess as to one possible explanation.
Re: Re: Re:5
Please seek professional psychiatric treatment for your obvious mental illness.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:6
Please seek professional help for your obvious lack of empathy.
Re: Re: Re:7
[Hallucinates facts not in evidence]
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:4
I have a suspicion that Pegasus software has been installed in most servers in the country and world for that matter hoovering up all data.
Re: Re: Re:5
I’m not really surprised that you would think that. You seem extremely paranoid.
Re: Re: Re:3
Is that you, George? Still got Bluetooth in your teeth? Or did the CIA/FBI et al recover their property?
Re: Re: Re:3
Since the technical definition of a hacker is someone who alters the code of someone else’s computer or system, not their brain, you are the only one who can possibly prevent you choosing options one and two.
Re: Re: Re:4
That besides, I’ve never heard of someone hacking a computer to insert misspellings or false statements into someone’s comments on a blog—or to force someone to read and make comments on a specific website, for that matter.
Re: Re: Re:5
To add.
Our new harasser seems to have been able to access Youtube up until 2018 and seems to be able to use Linkedin.
So, it’s clearly not hackers.
Re: Re: Re:5
A statement I’ve made a few times myself in the past few days, but I wasn’t addressing that particular steaming pile on this occasion because it was a smaller point than the one I made.
Re: Re: Re:
Looks like I won my bet. I am going to treat myself to a cookie for being correct about your chosen path. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the first time you have ever heard this here, and it may be the last, but I appreciate your contribution.
Re: Re: Re:
Even if I accepted all of that nonsense as true, what does that have to do with anything that came before?
Like, you can clearly access this site just fine, so your inability to access other sites doesn’t seem relevant here. Nor would you being hacked have anything to do with the content being flagged since you aren’t claiming you didn’t write it, and a hack on your computer wouldn’t cause others to flag you.
Basically, before we even get to whether your claims are true, please explain how they are relevant.
Re: Re: Re:
I’m pretty sure you’re just loaded up with viruses from goin to sketchy porn sites.
Re:
Because people don’t like your paranoid libertarian hot takes?
Re:
The same reason used toilets get flushed.
The turds you’re leaving the comments only stink up the place.
At this point it feels like he lost it by choice. He got the keys to the kingdom, got a look at how bot accounts benefit conservative figures and heavily bolster his own numbers and decided it was better to do nothing than to lose a few hundred thousand followers and be screamed at by dribbling lunatics over their loss of reach.
Re:
Assuming he isn’t being tasked with killing Twitter entirely. Some of the people that helped fund the purchase would be mighty interested in that…
Re: Re:
They’d get just as much benefit from it existing and handing over information on dissidents on demand, or blocking unfavourable news and the accounts that post it, all the things the right accused twitter of doing continually but actually has done under Elon when it benefits his business interests in places ruled by right wing autocrats. It’s worth more to the worst people if it exists as a propaganda engine rather than a dead site as it’s userbase will move elsewhere and they’ll be back at square one.
The days of V1agra and C1al1s have returned.
What a “shame”
Shit ol bratty Matty must be on vacation this week.
Re:
I think Andrea Iravani is his understudy. And he’s doing a bang-up good job of filling in for him.
Re: Re:
I’ve seen speculation it’s an AI. If so, it did a marvelous job in working out the crybully tactic.
Re: Re: Re:
Considering the relentless replying to itself and the not so subtle chosen pseudonym that abbreviates to “AI”, Andrea Iravani gets points for craftsmanship.
Realistically though, points for craftsmanship in this case is like rewarding a dog with a spray of water to the face for dumping a turd on the living room carpet.
Re: Re:
Actually, Andrea seems to be Hyman Rosen’s replacement, going by their clear transphobia.
autocrats, and wannabe autocrats, and their special operations..
Yet another promise he refuses to live up to.
Wait for it….
Wait for it….
Ohhhhh
smiles the happy sociopath smile
I mean… Elon had to put his name in his own bio. And he lost the “pussy in bio” war right there.
They’re not, actually. Stopping spam allows the free speech of genuine users of the platform. Unless, like Elmo, you believe ‘free speech’ to mean ‘consequence-free speech’.
Re:
Legally, they are. Spam is protected under 1A, so you can’t stop spam while simultaneously allowing free speech.
There’s also the technical aspect, in that pretty much any spam filter will sometimes catch legitimate user speech, thus prohibiting free speech.
Re: Re:
The first amendment only applies to the government. Blocking spam might violate the freedom of speech if the government did it, but if ExTwitter does it there is no first amendment violation.
Also, there is no apparent free speech violation in saying “I refuse to spend my money and use my computer(s) to distribute your speech. Buy your own computer and distribute your speech yourself”. That is what sites are doing when they block spam. That is why one hundred percent of people claiming that Twitter or Facebook is denying them freedom of speech are wrong.
It is better to say that there is a conflict between allowing unrestricted speech on a platform versus blocking spam — but that’s a tautology. Obviously there’s a conflict between blocking no speech and blocking speech.
Re: Re:
And Strawb is wrong again. You can’t violate the First Amendment if you’re a private actor, such as a social media website. Therefore, even if a spam filter does catch a genuine comment (as the human spam filter here [the flagging system] does far too often, that’s not a violation of the First Amendment. Read your Constitution, won’t you?
Re: Re: Re:
You can, actually. Or do you not consider threatening someone’s livelihood (or life) over their speech to be a violation of the threatened party’s First Amendment rights?
Re: Re: Re:2
Actually, that sounds like one of the exceptions to the First Amendment where the government is allowed to censor, rather than a private actor violating someone’s First Amendment rights. But do go on being completely wrong and creating fallacious arguments in the futile effort of ‘proving’ someone else wrong/
Re: Re: Re:3
I don’t see how I’m wrong. If Person A threatens Person B with lawsuits and/or violence to keep Person B from expressing speech Person A doesn’t like, that would be an attempt to violate the 1A rights of Person B by way of coercing them into silence. That the coercive speech of Person A may be unlawful is irrelevant.
Re: Re: Re:4
It violates 1A when the courts (aka the government) are involved.
Re: Re: Re:4
If Person A threatens Person B with lawsuits and/or violence to keep Person B from expressing speech Person A doesn’t like, that would be a violation of the First Amendment only if Person B calls Person A’s bluff and Person A goes ahead and files a lawsuit. Up until that point, no First Amendment violation. Looks like you don’t know your own Constitution, either.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
I kiss all you who do nothing but argue the colour of the sky. You are worse than trolls, but at least you keep replying to my posts.
Smoochie you lovelies.
Re:
Does it help when someone replies? i hope you feel better soon, then.
Re:
How on earth do you kiss yourself? Obviously not French kissing.