Quoc Tuan, Nguyen

ENC 1102
17 October, 2016.

Annotated Bibliography
Rutenberg, Jim. On Twitter, Hate Speech Bounded Only by a Character Limit. The
New York Times, 2 October 2016, p. B5.

This newspaper article appeared on the New York Times, a popular newspaper

article aims at liberal readers and subscribers, discussing about how recent activities

on the social website have gone virally negative. The author connected the recent

political events with a spiral of hate speeches appear on, not only Twitter, but on other

social networks such as Facebook and Instagram. Nevertheless, the main point is that

these social websites efforts to stop hate speeches are next to helpless when they have

to put up with freedom of speech derived from pseudonymity and anonymity. It is

because such efforts often get really close to censorship and what follows would

involve lawsuits. Ultimately, the newspaper asserts that toxic behaviour is just human

nature, which already was already showing back in the golden age of radio. For my

research, it is worth to look into the frequency of toxic behaviours connecting to

contemporary events and if filtering comments and news would influence that

frequency. Thus, I can use that hypothesis to add scaling questions on my survey.

1
 Reflection

The newspaper was focusing on the business nature of social network. While

it looks like a wholesale bargain of news and comments, the regulation are vague and

obscure to the benefits of getting more users on board. The strategy is seen to uphold

freedom of speech and expression, but also acts as protection for people who

maliciously wish to sabotage somebody else. The author made it clear that no matter

the social media try to curtail its content while asserting to stay neutral, there will

always be conflict of censorship. The author also drew the similarities of how political

viewpoints were controlled through radio back in the day. Altogether, it shows that

whenever there is a channel of distributing news, there will be different and

conflicting expression that creates friction to sparks toxic behaviours. Hence, the

author mentions one way of dealing with such intensity is to approve decentralized

monitoring and the filtering of comments and news pieces in regard to recent political

events. It is worth to establish such hypothesis into a survey to see how people would

react to such monitoring. Would users of online social network like to expose

themselves to the ugly side to generate their own antibodies? Would decentralize

monitoring and curtail of opinions and news be allowed? Those are some questions

that I would like to incorporate into my survey.