Juno News - July 16, 2019


Lindsay Shepherd banned from Twitter


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

170.27026

Word count

735

Sentence count

42

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Free speech advocate Lindsay Shepard has been permanently banned from the social media platform. She doesn t know what caused it, but she suspects it was an exchange she had with a transgender activist who goes by Jessica Yaniv. But Yaniv also believes that no debate should be allowed.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Free speech activist Lindsay Shepard has been permanently banned from Twitter.
00:00:07.000 She won't be the first person associated with the right to get kicked off the social media platform,
00:00:12.000 and she certainly won't be the last, but her vaporization at the hands of a big tech company
00:00:18.000 does send a particularly nasty chill through the free speech community,
00:00:23.000 mainly because she's one of its most vocal and fervent activists,
00:00:28.000 and I have a feeling she'll continue to be even without having the Twitter platform,
00:00:32.000 though as she noted, she will no longer have the opportunity to correct falsehoods and slander
00:00:38.000 that are routinely said about her on Twitter.
00:00:41.000 She doesn't yet know which tweets caused them to pull the trigger,
00:00:44.000 but she has a suspicion it was an exchange she had with a transgender activist who goes by Jessica Yaniv.
00:00:51.000 Now this got a very tense reaction on both sides.
00:00:55.000 Yaniv was tweeting about Lindsay Shepard's uterus and a reproductive abnormality about which Lindsay has been quite open,
00:01:02.000 and Lindsay Shepard responded to Yaniv,
00:01:05.000 well, at least I have a uterus, and referred to Yaniv as a male.
00:01:10.000 Now Yaniv is transgender. 0.96
00:01:12.000 That's Yaniv's Twitter profile right there.
00:01:14.000 But Yaniv also believes that no debate should be allowed, no discussion should be allowed,
00:01:19.000 actually was cheerleading when Lindsay Shepard's account was suspended by Twitter. 0.94
00:01:24.000 Now, as a private company, Twitter has the right to decide who's on the platform and who's not.
00:01:29.000 The issue that I want to expose is that Twitter claims it stands up for an open forum and a free platform,
00:01:35.000 but in actuality exposes its own double standards routinely.
00:01:40.000 Take a look at what happened here.
00:01:42.000 Now, presumably Twitter was enforcing the section of its policy that prohibits dead naming or misgendering.
00:01:48.000 It's actually in Twitter's policy that you are not allowed to, on Twitter, refer to a transgender person by a name or pronoun different than the one they prefer to use.
00:01:59.000 But those same rules also prohibit talking about someone's body in a sexual way.
00:02:05.000 Here's a tweet from Yaniv referring to Lindsay and her fiancé.
00:02:10.000 This is expressly prohibited by Twitter, but that tweet is still up.
00:02:14.000 Or this tweet, which is taking aim at Lindsay Shepard's body,
00:02:17.000 something that as well would go under the sexist targeted harassment that Twitter bans. 0.99
00:02:21.000 But again, Yaniv still has a Twitter account.
00:02:25.000 Big tech is not an ally to free speech.
00:02:28.000 Big tech is not actually facilitating any open forum.
00:02:32.000 It is simply imposing its own worldview on digital communication.
00:02:37.000 Why that's so dangerous is because governments right now around the world, including Canada, including the UK,
00:02:43.000 are getting into bed with big tech, imposing the government definition of free speech and hate speech on private companies,
00:02:50.000 who seem all too willing to drop the hammer down on anyone that speaks in a manner that they say is out of line.
00:02:58.000 Now, people on the right are going to say, let's boycott the platforms.
00:03:02.000 But in reality, Facebook, Twitter are still the market leaders when it comes to social media communication.
00:03:08.000 Ideally, these companies need to be held accountable by their users and hopefully change things a little bit.
00:03:14.000 Now, these are multi-billion dollar companies.
00:03:16.000 They have GDPs that exceed those of many nations.
00:03:19.000 They are probably not going to heed the call here.
00:03:23.000 But when people like Lindsey Shepard, who's a very measured, eloquent advocate on free speech,
00:03:29.000 is deemed too controversial for Twitter, what is there for anyone else?
00:03:33.000 The response to this is more speech.
00:03:37.000 Censorship is never going to solve any of the problems.
00:03:40.000 What this exchange between Lindsey Shepard and Yaniv shows is that the other side is not interested in a debate.
00:03:47.000 They are interested in shutting down anyone that does not 100% in lockstep go along with what they say.
00:03:54.000 You don't win the debate when your opponents are silenced.
00:03:57.000 All you do is delude and muddle and obscure the debate.
00:04:01.000 True North is always standing up for free speech, but we can't do it alone.
00:04:05.000 If you can join my Heritage Club for just a few dollars a month, you'll get access to some great goodies exclusively at True North.
00:04:11.000 You can do that by heading on over to TNC.news.
00:04:15.000 For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.
00:04:16.000 for True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.
00:04:17.000 for True North.
00:04:18.000 to True North, I'm Andrew Lawton...