I haven’t tried it, but according to Virginia Heffernan, if you set your geographic location in your Twitter profile to somewhere in Germany, you get German-level filtering, which bans Nazis from your feed.
Just think about it for a second: to get rid of Nazis, change your location to Germany.
I wonder if switching geographic location to Germany filters out Fox News anchors’ Twitter accounts. I would love to see Twitter’s analytics if true: “And Germany’s total Twitter users bumped up by 25 million last month with no real rate of change in total Twitter users added per month. Nothing to be read in that outlier statistic.”
I don’t get an excessive amount of Nazis, but my Twitter profile is now in Hamburg, Germany.
I’ll see if it makes any difference
Do you mind picking me up a hamburger while you’re there?
And, come to think of it, if you don’t mind stopping by Frankfurt…
Incidentally, this also demonstrates that Twitter is easily able to identify and ban the Nazis amongst its userbase. It just chooses not to.
We have a really fucked up sense of free speech over here. We conflate not arresting people for voicing their opinions with giving every asshat a platform and immunity from consequences.
the thing is, isn’t doing this the online equivalent of covering your eyes and sticking your fingers in your ears and going LALALALALALA? i see the appeal of avoiding reading nazi shit online, i get so sick of it too – but i also think it’s not good to turn a blind eye to their presence. i don’t want to cede the online space to them – i’d rather be reminded of just how aggressive and everywhere they are and fight to force them out of the normal, rational world.
Maybe you would react that way, but I would get so sick of the harassment so fast.
well, harassment is another thing altogether. i thought this was just about removing tweets from general streams you might see.
While arresting people for protesting… and not arresting people for organized right-wing violence.