Admitting I was wrong about platform moderation after a death threat got through

I used to think all content moderation was censorship, full stop. For about 2 years I argued that any removal of posts was a slippery slope. Then a guy who followed me on Twitter sent me a detailed death threat in DMs. I reported it and the platform took 6 days to review it. By the time they acted he had already made a new account and kept going. That moment made me realize I was treating all moderation as the same thing when theres a huge difference between removing hate speech and just deleting opinions. Has anyone else had a real world incident flip their view on where the line should be?

3 comments

3 Comments

susansingh1mo ago

Depends on what you mean by "got through." A death threat in DMs isn't the same as a public post telling someone to die. Private messages are different territory. Maybe the platform took 6 days because they actually looked at context instead of just auto-deleting everything.

evan_cooper731mo ago

Depends on what you mean by 'got through'" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I get what you're saying about context, but are we really acting like a death threat in a DM is somehow less serious than a public one? The intent is still to scare someone. A platform taking 6 days to "look at context" just sounds like they didn't care until the person complained loudly enough. If I walk up to you in a parking lot and whisper a threat in your ear versus yelling it across the street, is one more okay than the other? That just gives the platform an excuse to drag their feet. Most of these companies only act when it goes viral or their legal team gets a call, not because of some deep dive on user history.

jamesf291mo ago

Good point about the DM vs public post thing. That "different territory" idea makes me think the real issue isn't just how fast they act but what they even look for. In my case the guy had a history of posting violent stuff publicly too, so the DMs were part of a bigger pattern. Platforms should probably weigh a users whole record when deciding if a DM counts as a real threat. Like, one angry DM from someone with zero history is way different from someone who already talks about hurting people out in the open. Maybe the line is more about context and pattern than just the message format.