Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler, in a Motherboard article provoked by a report that a Twitter employee explained that an automated banning of white supremacy would also ban Republican politicians:

Twitter has not publicly explained why it has been able to so successfully eradicate ISIS while it continues to struggle with white nationalism. As a company, Twitter won’t say that it can’t treat white supremacy in the same way as it treated ISIS. But external experts Motherboard spoke to said that the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the very least, their supporters. So it’s no surprise, then, that employees at the company have realized that as well.

Here’s an idea: ban white supremacists. Then when white supremacists complain, no matter what their office or political affiliation, cite the tweets at issue and explain how they violate the rules and qualify has hate speech. If they scream “free speech!”, invite them to find another platform on which to express their hate.

In other words, do the right thing, and have a fucking backbone.

Much to my amusement, Twitter seems to think that I’ve tweeted over 5,000 times. I don’t see how this can possibly be, but there are days when I tweet a lot I guess. Still, 5,000 in a little under three years seems excessive. I realize that it counts DMs and retweets in that number (not many retweets yet, of course), but still, I question their algorithm. Since one can’t access one’s entire history of tweets (yet?), I can’t count for myself, either, alas.

In other news, I’ve been slowly making may way through my photos from the family trip to Japan. Yesterday, I posted photos from Kiyomizu-dera, Gion, and Teramachi, taken our first day in Kyoto. What a fabulously beautiful place! We walked around for hours, and it was a photographic feast. It was all I could do to trim things down to just 63 photos. I have many hundreds more to process still, from Kyoto, Nara, and Tokyo. I’ll get them up over the next week.

As for my current status? I realize I’ve been blogging less, but I’ve been no less busy hacking Perl and PostgreSQL stuff. In addition to ushering out a new version of Pod::Simple, I’ve been updating the code for my Perl doc browser project (example), adding features to pgTAP, and, erm, planning other stuff. Things will likely be slowish through the holidays, but there should be some interesting stuff trickling out over the coming weeks. Till then, this status post will have to do.

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