Conversation

"White racial resentment" = racism "Racially charged" = racist "Racially insensitive" = racist "Racially discriminatory" = racist "Implicit bias" = racism "Economic anxiety" = racism "What some are calling racist" = it's probably racist

Part of the intent is (supposedly) to mitigate e.g. structural racism by removing discriminatory content. In practice, it only makes the bigots express themselves more indirectly.

Further irony: the racists, being racists, convene with other racists. They know there are bots banning by keyword on Twitter, Facebook etc. So they goad non-racists into being flagged by the bots while using language that couldn't be flagged because it's too easy to false flag.

(Which is complete BS, because in any case someone is flagged incorrectly every time they try to address bigotry directly.) E.g.: "He wanted so badly to say "<insert slur>", but wrote this instead."

Furthermore, it doesn't take a doctorate in a linguistic field (which, to be fair, I don't have) to realize how easy it is to bypass the bots. It can be incredibly blatant and still go unflagged. It's almost impossible to get flagged if you know how it works. To wit:

12:51 PM · May 31, 2018Twitter Web Client

"So who do you think controls the media? The banks? The universities? If we let this go on much longer, who knows what will happen? We need to act." See what I mean? You can't flag any part of this statement, you just can't. You'd end up issuing bans for school meeting agendas.

Replying to

There are people who think the solution to this problem is more oversight, more sophisticated tracking, more sophisticated natural language analysis - not just keywords but semantics, content tracking, network activity, associations. You know what uses that tech? Drone strikes.

Every time some random civilian is killed for, for example, being the third cousin a terrorist because they live in south-eastern Afghanistan or something and *everyone* there is connected to a terrorist by 2 or 3 degrees of separation because that's how demographics WORK...

... every time someone is murdered for no good reason, because certain powerful people want it that way (see, I can be oblique too), it happens for the same reason there's censorship on Twitter: Some fucking idiots thought mass surveillance was a Good Idea.

And as usual I've started a thread thinking I wanted to write one thing, only to end up elsewhere. So, to further augment the tweet that catalyzed it: All that happens when bad speech is obfuscated and euphemized prettily, is that fighting it becomes like boxing with shadows.