Twitter Exec Is Questioned About "Learn to Code" Bannings | JRE Twitter Special

But let's talk about learn to code, right? Why are people being suspended for tweeting hashtag learn to code? We did some research on this. Yes, we did some research on this. So there was a situation, I guess about a month ago or so, where a number of journalists were receiving a variety of tweets, some containing learn to code, some containing a bunch of other coded language that was wishes of harm. These were thousands and thousands of tweets being directed at a handful of journalists. And we did some research and what we found was a number of the accounts that were engaging in this behavior, which was tweeting at the journalists with this, either learn to code or things like Day of the Rope and other coded language, were actually Ban of Asian accounts. That means accounts that had been previously suspended. And we also learned that there was a targeted campaign being organized off our platform to abuse and harass these journalists. That's not true. See, here's the thing. An activist who works for NBC wrote that story and then lobbied you. You issued an official statement. And then even the editor in chief of the Daily Caller got a suspension for tweeting learn to code at the Daily Show. So I have never talked to anybody from NBC about this issue. No, so they report it. Don't misrepresent me. They report it. The narrative goes far and wide amongst your circles. Then all of a sudden you're seeing high profile conservatives tweeting a joke getting suspensions. So again, some of these tweets actually contained death threats, wishes of harm, other coded language that we've seen to mean death to journalists. So it wasn't about just the learn to code. It was about the context that we were seeing. That's just not true. The editor in chief of the Daily Caller was suspended for tweeting nothing but hashtag learn to code. So Tim, can I finish what I was saying? Yeah. So we were looking at the context and what was happening is there were journalists receiving hundreds of tweets. Some had death threats. Some had wishes of harm. Some just learned to code. And in that particular context we made a decision. We consider this type of behavior dogpiling, which is when all of a sudden individuals are getting tons and tons of tweets at them. They feel very abused or harassed on the platform. Can we pause this because this is super confusing for people who don't know the context. The learn to code thing is in response to people saying that people that are losing their jobs, like coal miners and truck drivers and things like that could learn to code. This was almost like ingest initially. Or if it wasn't ingest initially, it was so poorly thought out as a suggestion that people started mocking it. Correct? So the first stories that came out were simply like can miners learn to code? Coal miners. And the hashtag learn to code is just a meme. It's not even necessarily a conservative one, though you will see more conservatives using it. But it was people are using it to mock how stupid the idea of taking a person who's uneducated, who's in their 50s, who should learn some new form of vocation and then someone says learn to code. And so then other people, when they're losing their job or when something's happening, people would write learn to code because it's a meme. Well, not even necessarily. I would just characterize learn to code as a meme that represents the elitism of modern journalists and how they target certain communities with disdain. So to make that point, there are people who have been suspended for tweeting something like, I'm not too happy with how Buzzfeed reported the story hashtag learn to code. Making representation of these people are snooty elites who live in ivory towers. But again, this is a meme that has nothing to do with harassment, but some people might be harassing somebody and might tweet it. Why would we expect to see, even still today, I'm still getting messages from people with screenshots saying I've been suspended for using a hashtag, and the editor in chief of the Daily Caller, right, he quote tweeted a video from the Daily Show with hashtag learn to code. And he got a suspension for it. So why learn to code? Why is that alone so egregious? And I don't think it is so egregious. So is it just something that got stuck in an algorithm? No, it was, again, a specific set of issues that we were seeing targeting a very specific set of journalists. And it wasn't just the learn to code, it was a couple of things going on. A lot of the accounts tweeting learn to code were ban-evaders, which means they've seriously been suspended. A lot of the accounts had other language in them, tweets had other language like day of the brick, day of the rope, oven ready. These are all coded meanings for violence against people. And so, and people who are receiving this were receiving hundreds of these in what appeared to us to be a coordinated harassment campaign. And so we were trying to understand the context of what was going on and take action on them. Because again, I don't know, Joe, if you've ever been the target of a dog-piling event on Twitter, but it is not particularly fun when thousands of people or hundreds of people are tweeting at you and saying things. And that can be viewed as a form of harassment. It's not about the individual tweet, it is about the volume of things that are being directed at you. No, I understand. And so in that particular case, we made the judgment call, and it is a judgment call, to take down the tweets that were responding directly to these journalists that were saying learn to code, even if they didn't have a wish of harm specifically attached to them because of what we viewed as coordinated attempt to harass them. And again, like I was saying, some of the other signals in coded language. And we were worried that learn to code was taking on a different meaning in that particular context. So, but in and of itself though, it still seems like there's alternative meanings to learn to code. It still could be used, as Tim was saying, to mock, you know, elite, snooty... Speak truth to power. Yes, absolutely. I agree with you. So it's really about the context of what was happening in that situation and all those other things. I think in a very different situation, we would not take action on that. Okay. But doesn't that seem like you're throwing a blanket over a very small issue? Because learn to code in itself is very small. The blanket is cast over racism. The blanket is cast over this, all the other horrible things that are attached to it. But the horrible things that are attached to it are the real issue. This learn to code thing is kind of a legitimate protest in people saying that these minors should learn to code. That's kind of preposterous. Well, the first articles weren't mean. It was just, learn to code kind of identified, you have these journalists who are so far removed from middle America that they think you can take a 50-year-old man who's never used a computer before and put him in a... The stories, I think, were legitimate. But the point more so is it was a meme. The hashtag, the idea of learn to code condenses this idea, and it's easy to communicate, especially when you only have 280 characters, that there is a class of individual in this country. I think you mentioned on, was it Sam Harris, that the left, these left liberal journalists only follow each other? In the run up to the 2016 elections. I still believe that to be true. I've worked in these offices. It has changed. They've done the study again, the visualization, and now there is a lot more cross-pollination. But what we saw is folks who were reporting on the left end of the spectrum mainly followed folks on the left and folks on the right followed everyone. What you were talking about earlier, there's these bubbles. There's bubbles and we've helped create them and maintain them. That's what ends up happening, and this is one of the big problems that people have. With this story particularly, you have a left-wing activist who works for NBC News. I'm not accusing you of having read the article. He spends a day lobbying to Twitter saying, you have to do this, you have to make these changes. The next day he writes a story saying that 4chan is organizing these harassment campaigns and death threats. While 4chan was doing threads about it, you can't accuse 4chan simply for talking about it because Reddit was talking about it too, as was Twitter. The next day, after he published his article, now he's getting threats. Twitter issues a statement saying we will take action. To make matters worse, when John Levine, a writer for The Wrap, got a statement from one of your spokespeople saying, yes, we are banning people for saying learn to code, a bunch of journalists came out and then lied. I had no idea why saying this is not true, this is fake news. Then a second statement was published by Twitter saying it's part of a harassment campaign. The mainstream narrative becomes, oh, they're only banning people who are part of a harassment campaign. You literally see legitimate high profile individuals getting suspensions for joining in on a joke. They're for sure probably mistakes in there. I don't think that any of us are claiming that we got this 100% right. Probably our team having a lack of context into actually what's happening as well. We would fully admit we probably were way too aggressive when we first saw this and made mistakes. I hope this clarifies then. You have situations like this where you can see, this journalist, I'm not going to name him, but he routinely has very left wing, I don't want to use overtly esoteric words, but intersectional dogmatic points of view. What does that mean? Intersectional feminism is considered a small ideology. People refer to these groups as the regressive left or the identitarian left. These are basically people who hold views that a person is judged based on the color of their skin instead of the content of their character. You have the right wing version, which is like the alt right, the left wing version, which is like, intersectional feminism is how it's simply referred to. You'll see people say things like, typically when they rag on white men or when they say white feminism, these are signals that they hold these particular views. These views are becoming more pervasive. What ends up happening is you have a journalist who clearly holds these views, I don't even want to call him a journalist, he writes extremely biased and out of context story. Twitter takes action in response, seemingly in response, then we can look at what happens with Oliver Darcy at CNN. He says, you know, the people at CPAC are conservatives are gullible eating red meat from grifters, among other things, disparaging comments about the right. He's the one who's primarily advocating for the removal of certain individuals who you then remove. Then when Kathy Griffin calls for doxxing, that's fine. When this guy calls for the death of these kids, he gets a slap on the wrist. Look, I understand the context matters, but grains of sand make a heap. Eventually you have all of these stories piling up and people are asking you why it only flows in one direction. I got to be honest, I'd imagine that calling for the death three times of any individual is a banable offense, even without a warning. You just get rid of them. But it didn't happen. We see these people say men aren't women though and they get a suspension. We see people say the editor in chief of the Daily Caller may be the best example. Hashtag learn to code, quoting the Daily Show and he gets a suspension. Threatening death and inciting death is a suspension too. It feels like it's only going in one direction. I think we have a lot of work to do to explain more clearly when we're taking action and why. Certainly looking into any mistakes we may have made in those particular situations.