https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614772/twitter-has-to-finally-figure-out-what-to-do-with-dead-peoples-accounts/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50581287
So Twitter has updated their privacy policy so they can encourage people to log in and tweet at least every six months to keep their accounts active. Backlash ensues because some inactive accounts, you know the ones that Twitter are supposed to take down, are actually dead in real life, forcing them to halt the process.

I'm sure hope that they will be fine, but this is just ridiculous.

UPDATE: Well, it's not the only concern we've facing. They're also planning on banning violent sexual content and extreme violent content.
https://thenextweb.com/tech/2019/12/05/twitter-to-follow-facebook-and-instagram-with-new-anti-nsfw-guidelines/

I hope not, that would suck because sometimes people post images solely on twitter and sometimes they become inactive for a long time due to various reasons.

It would definitely suck if they deleted my favorite Youtube G-modders twitter account. Kitty0706 who passed away back in '15.

A lot of sites seem to be planning stupid ideas. YouTube, Soundcloud, and now Twitter. At least Twitter seems to be trying to approach the matter with a bit more tact...

vex714 said:
It would definitely suck if they deleted my favorite Youtube G-modders twitter account. Kitty0706 who passed away back in '15.

Has it really been almost 5 years since his passing? Man, time goes by quick

TheHuskyK9 said:
Has it really been almost 5 years since his passing? Man, time goes by quick

I hear ya. Come January it will be five years. I still go to his YT channel to watch his videos. Check his Twitter and reminisce and appreciate his upbeat humor.

IndigoHeat said:
A lot of sites seem to be planning stupid ideas. YouTube, Soundcloud, and now Twitter. At least Twitter seems to be trying to approach the matter with a bit more tact...

Well, they stated that they halted the mass-deletion process until they're done with memorising the deceased. Still means bad news for those alive.

Also, they stated that the European Union will be their first target when they resume said process.

You may not be dead, just to name a few examples, you could be in jail, kidnapped or coma. Then, you find out that your Twitter account no longer exists (according to quantum mechanics it still exist in the past, but that is not the point).
I recommend using Minds instead of Twitter.

felix_nermix said:
You may not be dead, just to name a few examples, you could be in jail, kidnapped or coma. Then, you find out that your Twitter account no longer exists (according to quantum mechanics it still exist in the past, but that is not the point).
I recommend using Minds instead of Twitter.

But very few seems to use it as Twitter is still popular. Even if the artists moved here, chances are that they only upload the most recent work.

Backup their stuff now before they're gone.

Are they deleting the data, or just preventing public access to it?
My spidey sense tells me it's the latter.

One thing you do have to consider that even if Twitter is absurdly large website and company, it's still company that tries to make money and keeping all those memes saved and secured is expensive. That's media is always so compressed there.

Also Twitter is all about what's happening right now in the world, not what happened year ago, you can see this how all everything is from newest to oldest infinite scroll page and how they got rid of stuff like media grid view.

What would help with this is Twitter simply send all of the data of the user for them when account is closed down.

Munkelzahn said:
Are they deleting the data, or just preventing public access to it?
My spidey sense tells me it's the latter.

With Facebook, I would say that they "delete" the account just in case you come back half year later, unless you threat them with EU laws.
With Twitter, I would assume full on deletion, they have shown to have far less insentive to keep data around.

But why? For money? Too expensive to host that much (pretty much what Mairo said)? Isn't the internet supposed to be vast and infinite?

Is this a solution?

JanZ said:
I do hope that they can still clear up accounts that don’t contain any tweets at all

@cerberusmod_3: clear up bot accounts too?

Thought: maybe E6 should clear non-activated accounts after a year? Or would that not help?

vex714 said:
But why? For money? Too expensive to host that much (pretty much what Mairo said)? Isn't the internet supposed to be vast and infinite?

Internet is vast and infinite? Yes.
Server? Noooope.

It costs literal money to keep data on memory on powered on hard drives 24/7 where maybe one person sees it in next decade. And it's not goverments or non-profit organizations servers, it's company servers.

And you have to remember the scale. It's extremely common for people to share images and gifs many times daily, now multiply that by millions. They could save terabytes if not more data by simply getting rid of data that almost literally nobody will ever see and which is most likely also already backed up by archive websites.

Mairo said:
They could save terabytes if not more data by simply getting rid of data that almost literally nobody will ever see and which is most likely also already backed up by archive websites.

By archival image sites like E6? Or do other archival sites do the leg work to include text?

Texts aren't important to image archives but I'm thinking about criminal investigations and evidence, stuff like that. Do archive sites save those too or are those gone forever if twitter does the six month deletion thing?

vex714 said:
By archival image sites like E6? Or do other archival sites do the leg work to include text?

Archive.is, wayback machine, etc.

Regardless, I feel like I'm repeating myself like a goddamn parrot which I'm not: all of these things are completely and utterly irrelevant for twitter. The service they offer is to give hot new takes and memes from users to users asap and make money.

Also like anything else with computers, if it's important, back that shit up. It's not requirement for private companies to keep your online presence and files for you, especially if you aren't paying for them. Even in the example of the news, if it's single individual checking tweets of another individual who has passed away, you can crawl their content or simply ask for zip file from twitter directly.

Mairo said:
Archive.is, wayback machine, etc.

Regardless, I feel like I'm repeating myself like a goddamn parrot which I'm not: all of these things are completely and utterly irrelevant for twitter. The service they offer is to give hot new takes and memes from users to users asap and make money.

I see, I knew it was about the money, I just didn't know about their "live for the here and now" attitude and make quick buck off of user generated memes and ideas.

Even in the example of the news, if it's single individual checking tweets of another individual who has passed away, you can crawl their content or simply ask for zip file from twitter directly.

Well, I didn't know that. Interesting.

Mairo said:
Archive.is, wayback machine, etc.

Regardless, I feel like I'm repeating myself like a goddamn parrot which I'm not: all of these things are completely and utterly irrelevant for twitter. The service they offer is to give hot new takes and memes from users to users asap and make money.

Also like anything else with computers, if it's important, back that shit up. It's not requirement for private companies to keep your online presence and files for you, especially if you aren't paying for them. Even in the example of the news, if it's single individual checking tweets of another individual who has passed away, you can crawl their content or simply ask for zip file from twitter directly.

So if I want to save shit from the grave, then it will be quite a hell to do. Not only are there way too many users and I don't know which are inactive, but if it really happens on the 11th of December, then it's too late.

sweet! I can finally get the username I wanted

Suggest Twitter users to move to Minds. Use other account to avoid being banned from Twitter. Be gentle to avoid being taken as a spammer or a troll.

Every day, I only wish more and more for the decentralization of Internet to happen. Blogs and forums, all bundled together with RSS, IRC chatrooms and XMPP instant messaging. No megacorporations controlling what people can or cannot say or think, no deplatforming, just pure, early Internet freedom.

A man can dream, a man can dream.

It all comes full circle is the end. Well at least under the ideology of "business priorities = #1st profit, /list"

https://thenextweb.com/tech/2019/12/05/twitter-to-follow-facebook-and-instagram-with-new-anti-nsfw-guidelines/
Well, I thought removing inactive accounts isn't the only concern, but also banning rape and gore?

What shall we do? Backup or protest?

I can't see any compelling reason for Twitter to maintain accounts that aren't being regularly logged into. They aren't a memorial service, they aren't responsible for keeping accounts open for people who never log in, and server space isn't unlimited. Some of these arguments seem illogical, specious, or even silly.

Also, can someone help me understand why "banning violent sexual content and extreme violent content" is a bad thing?

CCoyote said:
I can't see any compelling reason for Twitter to maintain accounts that aren't being regularly logged into. They aren't a memorial service, they aren't responsible for keeping accounts open for people who never log in, and server space isn't unlimited. Some of these arguments seem illogical, specious, or even silly.

Also, can someone help me understand why "banning violent sexual content and extreme violent content" is a bad thing?

I've just saw it recently when looking for the news about Twitter. No surprise.

CCoyote said:
Also, can someone help me understand why "banning violent sexual content and extreme violent content" is a bad thing?

Because it doesn't differentiate between reality and fantasy, real or drawn. It treats a drawing of a fictional scenario with fictional characters as equivalent to a real-life act with real-life people.

Their own guidelines state:

“We prohibit violent sexual conduct to prevent the normalization of sexual assault and non-consensual violence associated with sexual acts. We prohibit gratuitous gore content because research has shown that repeated exposure to violent content online may negatively impact an individual’s wellbeing,"

Which is a full load of horse manure. Fictional drawings don't normalize real-life behavior (if anything, the opposite is true, that access fictional depictions of certain fetishes decreases the risk of it happening in real-life), and research has consistently shown repeated exposure to violent content doesn't have any lasting impact on a person's well-being.

Watsit said:
Because it doesn't differentiate between reality and fantasy, real or drawn. It treats a drawing of a fictional scenario with fictional characters as equivalent to a real-life act with real-life people.

Their own guidelines state:
Which is a full load of horse manure. Fictional drawings don't normalize real-life behavior (if anything, the opposite is true, that access fictional depictions of certain fetishes decreases the risk of it happening in real-life), and research has consistently shown repeated exposure to violent content doesn't have any lasting impact on a person's well-being.

Well, either they chose to delete something offensive just to save money or that Twitter is run by SJWs like any other mainstream webholes.

@Watsit, it sounds to me like you might be so focused on a single gamer issue that you aren't considering the other things they have to deal with. Twitter has a lot of user groups, not just gamers, artists, and furries.

Twitter makes the rules for their platform, just like e621 admin do here. It's not a democracy, and they aren't required to protect anyone's rights to free speech. One either abides by their rules, or one takes their business to another platform.

Lastly, @cerberusmod_3, it's very difficult to take this conversation seriously once people start using "SJW" as a cudgel.

(NOTE: Various edits for word choice, punctuation, etc.)

CCoyote said:
One takes their business to another platform.

A little more difficult to do considering Twatter is a social media juggernaut. I see it as lowering into Dumblr levels of censor. They do it for the sponsor, driven by money and intellect murdering memes. It just makes content more difficult to find, though not impossible to locate.

I do apologize for the digressional rabble. I just had to get it out my chest, even if I did go on a slight tangent. Promise, no text walls again.

CCoyote said:
@Watsit, it sounds to me like you might be so focused on a single gamer issue that you aren't considering the other things they have to deal with. Twitter has a lot of user groups, not just gamers, artists, and furries.

I never brought up gaming (though the latter point is one oft-levied against games). Regardless, as I mentioned, Twitter's rules don't differentiate between real and fantasy. It would be fine if they were just banning real depictions of these things (I would think real violence and sexual assault content is already banned), but it specifically includes art, including furry art.

CCoyote said:
It's not a democracy, and they aren't required to protect anyone's rights to free speech.

I never said it is or they do. However, you asked why them banning this stuff is a bad thing, and I explained that it's being done under false pretenses and that it could end up causing more harm than good.

Watsit said:
I explained that it's being done under false pretenses and that it could end up causing more harm than good.

Herein we disagree.

vex714 said:
A little more difficult to do considering Twatter is a social media juggernaut.

Most people aren't required to participate in social media. They could just not be on Twitter.

CCoyote said:
Most people aren't required to participate in social media. They could just not be on Twitter.

Too late. Most people has been uploading their own works on Twitter from the very beginning. Either we should back their stuff up and run or form an internet riot to make Twitter mad.

Also, that quote about Twitter being a social media juggernaut is misattributed. It was actually vex714's.

cerberusmod_3 said:
Also, that quote about Twitter being a social media juggernaut is misattributed. It was actually Watsit's.

Whoops! It was @vex714. I fixed it. Thanks!

CCoyote said:
Whoops! It was @vex714. I fixed it. Thanks!

Man. We've messed up.

CCoyote said:
Also, can someone help me understand why "banning violent sexual content and extreme violent content" is a bad thing?

Wow.. Never realized just how big of a fan you were of the jack thompson and "OMG fictional 'bad things' might lead to real life bad things!!!" types and their fallacies.

So just to be clear.. Are you sure it should only be fictional "violent sexual content and extreme violent content" banned? And not just plain sexual and violent content instead? Or is that simply an issue for another day?

As for everyone else, who doesn't have a problem with the very idea that others have the freedom to wrongthink, fear of the inability of certain groups to force everyone to conform to their preferred standards and controls or isn't into tinfoil hat fallacies about fiction causing reality. No thank you.

cerberusmod_3 said:
https://thenextweb.com/tech/2019/12/05/twitter-to-follow-facebook-and-instagram-with-new-anti-nsfw-guidelines/
Well, I thought removing inactive accounts isn't the only concern, but also banning rape and gore?

What shall we do? Backup or protest?

(apologies if this doesn't add much to this conversation in advance!) Twitter banning NSFW accounts is kind of worrysome when I realize that there's some furry artists I follow that exclusively/nearly exclusively post and get commissions on Twitter; A couple artists I follow either exclusively post NSFW stuff or have a secondary account to post such content.

I mean, you can accuse Twitter of having a problem with wrongthink. It might be more accurate to accuse Twitter of wishing to appeal to the broadest possible majority, and have calculated that they'll appeal to a wider audience if they ban certain topics. You might even accuse them of being spineless for refusing to stand up for the speech and creativity of minorities who, someday, might find themselves socially ascendant after decades of repression (except I, personally, can't really say that with a straight face when it comes to certain niches in porn that are more-or-less directly targeted by this ban).

It's sort of like how E6 calculated, a long time ago, that it would appeal to a wider audience if they banned RP and creepy comments. To Twitter, this isn't even about wrongthink. It's about money. Ad revenue. Big data. People choosing to use the service, versus people potentially being turned away by associating Twitter with the things they find squicky, uncomfortable, or even morally indefensible.