"How Twitter's New Censorship Tools Are The Pandora's Box Moving Us Towards The End Of Free Speech", 17 Feb 2017

Earlier this morning social media and the tech press lit up with reports of users across Twitter receiving half day suspensions en masse as the platform abruptly rolled out its decade-overdue hate speech filter to its platform.  The company has refused to provide details on specifically how the new system works, but using a combination of behavioral and keyword indicators, the filter flags posts it deems to be violations of Twitter’s acceptable speech policy and issues users suspensions of half a day...[This] mark[s] an incredible turn of events for the company that...famously wrote Congress to say it would do everything in its power to uphold the right of terrorists to post freely to its platform...[T]he way in which Twitter has rolled out this new system and the potential for its abuse by governments, companies and others to stifle legitimate criticism has opened Pandora’s box and moved us a giant leap towards the end of free speech just when we need it more than ever.