Twitter, like any social network that allows a degree of anonymity, has its problems with trolls and people who spout hateful rhetoric. However, there have also been a number of incidents that have led users to suspect Twitter is lumping mainstream conservative voices in with those who are disseminating hate. Further, Twitter has been confounded by what to do about online movements such as #GamerGate, which are politically incorrect enough that they're decried by online feminists and the like, but are (mostly) within the bounds of acceptable discourse.

Well, it seems that Twitter is going to double down on their desire to appease progressive montagnards at the expense of having a platform that actually facilitates robust debate. A press release today announced they were partnering with various activist groups to form the " Twitter Trust & Safety Council":

To ensure people can continue to express themselves freely and safely on Twitter, we must provide more tools and policies. With hundreds of millions of Tweets sent per day, the volume of content on Twitter is massive, which makes it extraordinarily complex to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power. … As we develop products, policies, and programs, our Trust & Safety Council will help us tap into the expertise and input of organizations at the intersection of these issues more efficiently and quickly. In developing the Council, we are taking a global and inclusive approach so that we can hear a diversity of voices from organizations.

If you scan the list of organizations that Twitter has partnered with, you will see that this supposedly diverse group of voices runs the gamut from liberal identity politics stalwarts such as GLAAD to edgier axe-grinders such as Feminist Frequency. It's a fair bet that none of these groups have a particularly expansive notion of free speech. Take the "Dangerous Speech Project," which proposes limits on speech to prevent violence. In the Dangerous Speech Project's reckoning, dangerous speech is defined by five different factors:

-a powerful speaker with a high degree of influence over the audience -the audience has grievances and fear that the speaker can cultivate -a speech act that is clearly understood as a call to violence -a social or historical context that is propitious for violence, for any of a variety of reasons, including longstanding competition between groups for resources, lack of efforts to solve grievances, or previous episodes of violence -a means of dissemination that is influential in itself, for example because it is the sole or primary source of news for the relevant audience

Blogger Clark Bianco, who formerly wrote for the popular free speech blog Popehat.com and recently launched status451.com, notes that these criteria are so vague that "we start this game with a 5 point checklist, and four of the boxes are pre-checked for every single libertarian/right meme." Basically, the only one of these five points that doesn't already fit into erroneous preexisting liberal conceptions about angry and violent right wingers is the discernment involved in identifying "a speech act that is clearly understood as a call to violence."

But that might be the most chilling part of all. Recent history shows us that what the left clearly understands as a call to violence is far from literal and often borders on willful, delusional misinterpretation. By the same token, when the left is explicitly violent, their rhetoric gets rationalized away.

To be clear, the fact that Twitter censors people is not exactly a First Amendment crisis. It's a private company, so it's free to tend its walled garden as it sees fit (or at least do whatever the company thinks it needs to do to keep its stock price from plummeting more than it already has).

Then again, I suspect the San Francisco-based Twitter suffers from Pauline Kael-syndrome and doesn't understand that embracing such a narrow political perspective on speech issues is pretty off-putting to much of its user base.

For now, Twitter insists that there's no cause for alarm. "Seriously people," as one top Twitter developer said over the weekend, "We aren't idiots. Quit speculating about how we're going to 'ruin Twitter.'" And why would we indulge in such speculation? It's not as if there's precedent for idiots running a huge social network into the ground.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go update my Friendster and MySpace pages.