Callin Discussion Tonight at 5:00 pm EST: On Twitter, Censorship, and the Future of the Internet

I was planning on doing a Callin episode tonight anyway, to discuss yesterday’s column about the resignation of Jack Dorsey, but then I saw the news that Twitter has already made a major advance in its content moderation policies, announcing that it will henceforth be limiting the sharing of images:

“When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it.”

I spent a fair part of the morning polling people in both journalism and the tech business, trying to get a grasp on what this will mean practically, but this is exactly the problem with vaguely defined speech controls - nobody knows. As I wrote in yesterday’s piece, “Will Twitter Become an Ocean of Suck?” (readers overwhelmingly thought I used the wrong tense in the headline), the problem with making “harm” or “safety” a speech standard is that aggressive censors can make such standards mean almost anything.

In any case, I’ll be on Callin tonight at 5:00 p.m. to discuss. Just click here to join in: