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Twitter Bans Activist Mommy for Tweeting Her Dislike of Teen Vogue’s Sex Guide

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This one falls under “too stupid to believe,” but it’s actually true. Twitter has banned writer Elizabeth Johnston, who writes at “The Activist Mommy,” for her war of words with Teen Vogue editor Phillip Picardi

Not only has Twitter banned her, but YouTube will not allow her video commentaries to be monetized. While Johnston’s posts and views are controversial to some, none of what she has to say is new. Her views on homosexuality come from the best-selling book in the world — the Bible. The tweet that got her booted was a little salty and perhaps not the best tactic to use for persuasion, but it wasn’t any more obscene than the Teen Vogue article . . .

If Phillip Picardi doesn’t like the word “sodomy,” then why is he publishing articles encouraging young girls to practice it? And why is a gay magazine handing him awards for doing it? That does seem rather strange, doesn’t it? I can only guess that Johnston got suspended for using the words “sodomite” and “sodomy” instead of “gay” and “anal sex” and thus angering the gaystappo who appear to run social media.

But who knows? Does anyone have access to the list of words we aren’t allowed to use anymore? Someone should keep a running tally for reference. Frankly, there aren’t words low enough to describe the particular slime which oozes out of people who try to sexually corrupt children. I think she was too nice. (Read more from “Twitter Bans Activist Mommy for Tweeting Her Dislike of Teen Vogue’s Sex Guide” HERE)

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Twitter Blocked Pro-Life Ads

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Emails released by Live Action confirm that Twitter has been suppressing the group’s pro-life ad content.

Content related to defunding Planned Parenthood and ultrasound images of pre-born children are deemed by Twitter to be offensive. The social media company also banned tweets on investigations by Live Action and the Center for Medical Progress.

Twitter says the tweets violate its ad policy against “hate, sensitive topics, and violence.”

Live Action announced earlier this week that Twitter had been blocking its ads for some time, and the pro-life group had been trying to work with the social media company for months to resolve the issue.

Planned Parenthood is allowed to tweet that a woman has a right to an abortion, the pro-life group pointed out, and that those who oppose taxpayer-funded abortion are extremists. The abortion provider also says Planned Parenthood is needed. (Read more from “Twitter Blocked Pro-Life Ads” HERE)

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Pro-Life Group Claims Twitter Has ‘Suppressed’ Its Message

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A pro-life group is claiming Twitter has “suppressed” its ads.

Live Action, a nonprofit organization founded by Lila Rose to promote the end of abortion, released a statement Tuesday about its clashes with the social media giant. Twitter censorship accusations have been growing increasingly frequent in recent years.

“While Planned Parenthood is allowed to advertise on Twitter, the social media company has suppressed Live Action’s ads, calling our pro-life messages offensive and inflammatory,” Live Action wrote.

Live Action claims Twitter asked the group to delete many of its tweets regarding Planned Parenthood, the No. 1 abortion provider in the United States.

“While it won’t censor Live Action’s and Lila Rose’s tweets outright, Twitter has banned our ability to advertise our content until we delete all the tweets it deems offensive—or, in reality, all the tweets that offend Planned Parenthood,” the organization wrote.

“Twitter has told us that we must delete all of our tweets: 1. calling for the end of taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood; 2. all of our tweets of our undercover investigations into Planned Parenthood and; 3. any ultrasound images of preborn children,” said Live Action in the June 27 article.

Twitter’s content is monitored by the Twitter Trust and Safety Council. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry of The Week called the council an “Orwellian nightmare” when it was founded in February 2016.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, similarly raised concerns about the council, writing last year that “among the more than 40 organizations that make up the council, one finds such groups as the ‘Dangerous Speech Project,’ a group with ties to the liberal John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and to financier George Soros’ Open Society Institute.”

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (For more from the author of “Pro-Life Group Claims Twitter Has ‘Suppressed’ Its Message” please click HERE)

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Was Ex-Twitter CEO Censoring Negative Speech About Obama?

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According to a report by BuzzFeed News, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered staff to filter out “abusive and hateful” replies to President Obama during his #AskPOTUS Q&A session in 2015.

BuzzFeed reports:

According to a former senior Twitter employee, Costolo ordered employees to deploy an algorithm (which was built in-house by feeding it thousands of examples of abuse and harassing tweets) that would filter out abusive language directed at Obama. Another source said the media partnerships team also manually censored tweets, noting that Twitter’s public quality-filtering algorithms were inconsistent. Two sources told BuzzFeed News that this decision was kept from senior company employees for fear they would object to the decision.

If true, the information reveals a major fault-line in the social media company’s longstanding unfettered free speech stance. For many years, Twitter has touted itself as a global leader for free speech. Top executives even published a blog post boasting of such in 2011 titled, “The Tweets Must Flow.”

In the post, executives wrote, “Freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.”

“There are Tweets that we do remove, such as illegal Tweets and spam,” the blog post acknowledged. But only rarely, and only to serve the broader goal, which is simply to “not to remove Tweets on the basis of their content.”

… Except for when they may be harmful to a favored political figure. Got it. (For more from the author of “Was Ex-Twitter CEO Censoring Negative Speech About Obama?” please click HERE)

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Why Does President Obama’s Twitter Account Follow Porn Stars?

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President Obama’s Twitter account, which is run by his “Organizing for Action” staff, follows 636,000 accounts. Many of them you might expect: Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry. Even Mariah Carey and Snoop Dogg don’t really raise an eyebrow. But several accounts on the presidential follow list fit a different theme: Asa Akira, a porn star who has 653,000 followers and, in her Twitter bio, states “I have an award-winning a******.” Joanna Angel (390,000 followers), who describes herself as a “multiple award winning punk porno princess;” Penthouse Pet Of The Year Nikki Benz (808,000 followers); and Ashley Steel (138,000 followers), who writes that she is a “Porn Star, Doggy mama, Happiness Junkie, XXX Model, Buddhist, & Total nerd” . . .

Neither the Organizing for Action campaign nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Joe Rospars, Obama’s principal digital strategist for both presidential campaigns, said that he was not available to comment.

The most likely culprit is a piece of Twitter etiquette known as the “follow back.” Some consider it polite to follow your followers, and until recently, only Twitter accounts that followed each other could communicate through direct messages, which added a practical component to the tradition. Twitter once had an “auto-follow” feature that handled this process on behalf of users by automatically following any new followers. Twitter removed that auto-follow feature from its own site in 2009, but the capability stuck around in its API until 2013, allowing many third-party tools to set accounts to “auto-follow” regardless . . .

Twitter follow lists are technically public, but within the Twitter interface, followers can only be viewed by scrolling through every account: quite a task when you are following several hundred thousand people. “I would assume [someone in Obama’s position] doesn’t even know that they’re following those accounts,” says Stephanie Abrams Cartin, the founder and CEO of a New York City-based social media PR agency called Socialfly. Though social media audience management tools that make it easy to pinpoint an account’s following habits—including SocialRank, Little Bird, and Crowdfire—weren’t around when Twitter was getting started, they can reveal mistakes made in those early days of auto-follow that might have otherwise been forgotten. “There are smart things to automate like reporting and analytics—but follows, likes, tweets —smart social media managers and brands stay away from that; just too much that can go wrong,”says SocialRank CEO and Founder Alex Taub. (Read more from “Why Does President Obama’s Twitter Account Follow Porn Stars?” HERE)

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Twitter Users: FBI Says Everything You Retweet Can Be Used as Evidence in Criminal Investigations [+video]

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EIpgSD2KWith social media becoming so ubiquitous so quickly, it can be difficult to figure out what online silliness is fleeting and what can have real-world consequences. When it comes to Twitter, it seems it’s not just what you write that you have to worry about.

In the trial of 22-year-old Ali Saleh of Queens, the FBI is using his retweets of pro Islamic State messages against him.

“The FBI has been using retweets as evidence against Twitter-happy ISIS wannabes in other cases, as well. This summer a 17-year-old Virginia resident was arrested after regularly retweeting fawning statements about ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. So this is a tactic,” Kate Knibbs from Gizmodo writes. In Mississippi, two people were arrested for attempting to go to Syria to join the terror group again citing Twitter as evidence.

This is very troubling, because the implication is that, if convicted, this will establish a precedent that says what you share on social media can, in fact, be used against you. It also raises some pretty serious questions. (Read more from “Twitter Users: FBI Says Everything You Retweet Can Be Used as Evidence in Criminal Investigations” HERE)

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Twitter Users Offer Hilarious Questions for Hillary Clinton’s First Interview

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By Personal Liberty News Desk. Ahead of Hillary Clinton’s Tuesday appearance on CNN, her first national television interview of the 2016 election season, Twitter users beautifully trolled the former first lady using the hashtag #CNNHillaryQuestions. Here are eight essential questions the Twitterverse wants Clinton to answer.

1: Anything else you’d like to steal from the White House?

Do you have your eyes on any new White House artifacts/property you’d like to be taking home after your term is up? #CNNHillaryQuestions

— Keith MacDonald (@Macs_Wax) July 7, 2015

2: What difference, at this point, does it make?

#CNNHillaryQuestions At what point does something no longer matter?

— Angus E. Parvo (@angusparvo) July 6, 2015

3: How will you contain the media once they learn the ropes?

#CNNHillaryQuestions When the media learns how to go under or around ropes will you use bars?

— MarketRunner (@SWGaspar) July 6, 2015

(Read more from “Twitter Users Offer Hilarious Questions for Hillary Clinton’s First Interview” HERE)

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Hillary Clinton: ‘People Should and Do Trust Me’

By Eric Bradner. In Hillary Clinton’s first national interview of the 2016 race, she attacked her Republican rivals on immigration and dismissed the suggestion that the American people have a problem trusting her.

“People should and do trust me,” she told CNN’s Brianna Keilar.

She blamed the “barrage of attacks that are largely fomented by and coming from the right” for fueling a perception that trust is an area of vulnerability for her.

Clinton displayed little hesitation about attacking Republicans herself, saying that she is “very disappointed” in Donald Trump for his comments about immigrants and in the Republican Party for not condemning his remarks more quickly.

She then pivoted to skewering the entire GOP field for their immigration stance, saying, “They’re on a spectrum of hostility, which I think is really regrettable in a nation of immigrants like ours.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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The Arrival of Robot Crime: Twitter Bot Makes Death Threats, Police Question Owner

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By Kashmir Hill. Robots are starting to break the law, the law is trying to figure out what to do about it, and it all seems to be happening in Europe. Last month, Swiss authorities seized the Random Darknet Shopper art exhibit which included weekly purchases made by an automated bot given Bitcoin to surf a Dark Web marketplace. (It mainly bought drugs.) This week, police in the Netherlands are dealing with a robot miscreant. Amsterdam-based developer Jeffry van der Goot reports on Twitter that he was questioned by police because a Twitter bot he owned made a death threat.

Van der Goot’s bot used his own tweets as fodder, taking random chunks of them and trying to recombine them into new sentences that made sense. According to van der Goot, the bot tweeted something that sounded like a threat which mentioned an upcoming event in Amsterdam. Best of all, the bot was responding to another bot, according to van der Goot. He is not identifying the bot and says he has deleted it, per the request of the police. If this is not a hoax, this may be the first time police had to respond because of a robot-on-robot threat of violence. (Read more about the death threat from the Twitter bot HERE)


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Who Do We Blame When Robots Make Death Threats?

By Kashmir Hill. Last week, police showed up at the home of Amsterdam Web developer Jeffry van der Goot because a Twitter account under van der Goot’s control had tweeted, according to the Guardian, “I seriously want to kill people.” But the menacing tweet wasn’t written by van der Goot; it was written by a robot.

The police didn’t press charges. They just asked van der Goot, 28, to delete the account. The bot account only exists now as a cached page; the offending tweet has completely disappeared from the Internet’s surprisingly imperfect memory. It was a brief blip in the Twitter OMG machine, but the episode raises a fascinating and increasingly pressing question in these times of independent algorithms: Who is to blame when a robot does bad things? . . .

In this case, the bot itself got punished. It was killed off by its owner for its transgression at the urging of police. In the robot world, you can get the death penalty for a speech offense. Harsh! Who will stand up for robot civil liberties?


“Information by itself can commit a crime now,” Calo said by phone. If it is indeed a crime. A Twitter bot saying it wants to kill people isn’t really a threat because that bot can’t show up with a gun in a dark alley. (At least not yet.) But somebody on the receiving end of that threat could take it seriously not knowing that it’s a blustering bot. Here in the U.S., a yet-undecided Supreme Court case deals with exactly this issue: whether a man’s Facebook post with violent Eminem lyrics — that was interpreted as threatening by his ex-wife — is a true threat that can get him into legal trouble if he didn’t actually intend to hurt her. It would be much easier for American bots (and their owners) if the Supreme Court rules that empty threats are constitutionally protected.

I asked Calo if he thought any humans should take the fall for van der Goot’s bot, if it came to that. “I don’t know,” he said. “The law has to come up with a thing to do. It would probably look at the person who put the technology into play. (Ed. note: bot owner van der Goot.) If someone builds a general purpose tool — Ed. note: bot builder Hertling — you can’t go after them. In criminal law, you can’t go after person breeding a dangerous dog, but the person who lets it loose.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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New Jeb Bush Hire Couldn’t Remove ‘Slut’ Tweets Fast Enough, but Bush Still Wanted Him as Staff

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Photo Credit: TelegraphBy Breitbart News. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Monday decried messages posted to Twitter by a top technology aide as “inappropriate,” but a spokeswoman said the recent hire would remain with Bush’s nascent presidential campaign.

The distraction came on the same day Bush told supporters and former aides he is “singularly focused” on weighing a presidential bid, and as he prepared to release thousands of emails from his time as Florida’s chief executive and the first chapter of a related e-book to highlight what he called a compassionate leadership style with deep conservative credentials.

A Bush spokeswoman said he was disappointed to learn that Ethan Czahor – hired in January as chief technology officer of Bush’s Right to Rise political action committee – had posted messages on his personal Twitter account that referred to women as “sluts” and made remarks about gay men.

Within an hour, Czahor posted a new tweet, his first in months: “i deleted some old jokes i made years ago that i no longer find funny or appropriate. (hash)learning (hash)maturing”

Bush spokeswoman Kristy Campbell said Czahor, 31, the founder of Hipster.com, will stay in the role. (Read more about the new Jeb Bush hire’s tweets HERE)

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Despite Recent Comments Saying Jeb Bush’s New Hire Would Stay on Staff After ‘Slut’ Tweets, the New Hire Was Forced to Resign

By Rob Crilly. The tech whizz hired by Jeb Bush to oversee the digital side of an expected run for the White House has been forced to resign – for a series of offensive online posts.

The appointment of Ethan Czahor, who co-founded Hipster.com, as chief technology officer was only announced on Monday . . .

“While Ethan has apologised for regrettable and insensitive comments, they do not reflect the views of Governor Bush or his organisation, and it is appropriate for him to step aside,” said Kristy Campbell, a spokeswoman for Mr Bush.

American media reported that Mr Bush knew about the comments before his organising team hired Mr Czahor. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Twitter Blocked Campaign To Protect Pastors From Having To Hand Over Their Sermons and Emails To The Government

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Photo Credit: APTwitter blocked a petition campaign Wednesday to protect Houston pastors from having to hand over to the city government all of their sermons and personal emails dealing with the issue of homosexuality.

The Christian organization Faith Driven Consumer’s Twitter hashtag campaign #HoustonWeHaveAProblem was censored by Twitter minutes after launching so that users could not Tweet the petition and a warning was placed on Twitter-based links to the petition website. The group’s previous campaign #iStandWithPhil defending Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson was also blocked by Twitter at one time.

Read more from this story HERE.