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September 29, 2018 07:06 pm PDT

Twitter suspends academic who quoted feminist STEM research

MIT Comparative Media Studies researcher/instructor Chris Peterson is an adrent supporter of the Math Prize for Girls, and as part of his work with the organization, he's learned about the way that STEM fields were once considered inherently feminine, while the higher-status humanities were dominated by men -- it's the subject of some outstanding feminist scholarship by Professor Maria Charles.

Peterson tweeted a quote from Maria Charles's work on the subject in a discussion of the upcoming Math Prize for Girls, and then found that his Twitter account had been suspension, without any explanation (he was given a chance to appeal the suspension, but has been told he might have to wait for days to find out what Twitter thought he did wrong).

Peterson thinks he tripped over Twitter's new ban on "dehumanizing speech," which is meant to improve the quality of Twitter discourse by prohibiting Tweets that attack whole groups of people (formerly, Twitter banned attacking individuals on the basis of things like race or gender or sexual preferences, but not generalized racism, sexism, homophobia, etc).

Peterson's explanation seems plausible: although his tweet was a condemnation of sexism, it did discuss gender norms through a critical lens, and an overbusy Twitter moderator might well have mistaken its meaning. One of the great ironies of moderation -- etiher human or algorithmic -- is that criticism of bad speech often contains examples of bad speech that can trip up moderators (for example, a complaint about being the subject of a racial slur might repeat the slur). Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/O940wa4T5d4/platform-censorship.html

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