PJ Media
Richard Fernandez
Aug. 11, 2018
The practice of "deplatforming" individuals on the basis of content is actually just another form of signal filtering with all the advantages and disadvantages that go with it. "Filtering is a class of signal processing, the defining feature of filters being the complete or partial suppression of some aspect of the signal". Recently the New York Times sat in as Twitter attempted to formulate a set of rules determining what signals would be allowed to pass.
On Friday, to provide more transparency about its decision making, Twitter invited two New York Times reporters to attend the policy meeting. During the one-hour gathering, a picture emerged of a 12-year-old company still struggling to keep up with the complicated demands of being an open and neutral communications platform that brings together world leaders, celebrities, journalists, political activists and conspiracy theorists.
Even settling on a definition of dehumanizing speech was not easy. By the meeting’s end, Mr. Dorsey and his executives had agreed to draft a policy about dehumanizing speech and open it to the public for their comments.To Twitter's credit they realized the process was hard. After all, if filters are erroneously defined they will become a liability. Not only will they block out irrelevant information but the crucial signals as well. If an adversary knows the filter, he can mimic what the system is programmed to ignore and become invisible -- a "black hole in the water" to use a naval metaphor.
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https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/a-hole-in-the-water/
