#Nancy pelosi twitter update

'We want to keep in mind the potential effect of limiting counter-speech which is why we've initially excluded official political organizations, elected officials and political candidates from the Safety Mode beta,' said a Twitter spokesperson. EDT Twitter has provided the below statement to Mashable with additional information about political accounts, Safety Mode, and this specific incident involving the account.

#Nancy pelosi twitter update

Mashable has reached out to Twitter regarding the incident and will update this post if we hear back. It says so on its prompt that it doesn't get it 'right all the time' and it's working on improving detection. Perhaps they should stay away from Safety Mode.įor its part, Twitter knows this feature can accidentally block the wrong users. And the account isn't her official one, which can be found here: it's a bad look for any politician to block users, especially progressive activists who make up their base. For example, a politician's personal account is not necessarily a public forum just because it's run by a public official, even if that account posts about politics. Courts have ruled that a public official using a social media platform for public business is akin to a public forum, which means blocking users from accessing or interacting with it is in violation of their rights. It's also a possibility that this block is in violation of Marston's first amendment rights. And it's possibly the most unfortunate case for a false positive to occur: A diabetic activist advocating for affordable insulin gets blocked by an account belonging to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful public officials. However, this is clearly a case where the algorithm was wrong. Over the past couple of months, Twitter has been rolling out the Safety Mode feature broadly across the platform. This is certainly a problem on the platform and a tool to limit this can be a welcomed feature. First introduced in its testing phase in September of last year, when activated in a users' settings, Safety Mode will temporarily block accounts for a period of 7 days for using 'potentially harmful language' or sending repetitive and uninvited replies.' The main intent of the feature seems to be to help users who have a tweet go viral and then are inundated with nasty comments and spam mentions. Safety Mode is a fairly new feature from Twitter. Marston's tweet about the autoblock, directed at Twitter, quickly went viral. This happened when they were in Safety Mode, and we flagged your interactions as potentially abusive or spammy.' 'You're temporarily autoblocked from viewing and interacting with tweets. 'Autoblocked by Twitter,' reads the message, blocking Marston from viewing tweets from the account. Less than an hour later, Marston noticed this Twitter prompt when she tried to access the Twitter profile. Marston offered a fair critique along with additional context. There was no attack, harassment, or even vulgarity. So Marston added her comments in a quote tweet of original post. Meaning those without insurance are still stuck paying exorbitant over-priced amounts for life saving medication. The bill did not actually lower insulin's price from $300 or more per vial, it only capped copayments for those fortunate enough to have insurance. However, Marston wanted to add some crucial information that did not include in the tweet.

(193 Republicans voted no, as the Pelosi account pointed out.) The account had just sent a tweet about how every single House Democrat voted for a bill to cap insulin co-pays at $35 per month. That's the account Marston, an advocate for affordable insulin, replied to on Sunday which led to the block. This is Nancy's political account,' reads the account on Twitter. 'Organize, mobilize and fight #ForThePeople.

And that tweet from Marston resulted in her account being autoblocked by the Speaker of the House. This happened when Marston sent a tweet directed at an account connected to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. Over the weekend, healthcare activist Laura Marston inadvertently showcased just how Twitter's new safety mode can hinder legitimate discourse on the platform. Minimizing online harassment is a good thing, but what happens when some measures go too far?