lavabiopsy

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I don't think Twitter users need to comport themselves as school teachers. Twitter (and also Hacker News) requires you to conduct yourself to a certain level of etiquette in order to use the service, and some of that may be similar to the way a school teacher would behave -- in either case, you may be in the presence of 13 year olds that could be upset by your comments. I don't get why you are saying some people don't care about that etiquette -- that doesn't matter, agreeing to the etiquette is required to use the service, if you are using the service then it's agreed upon that you care about it.

It may be obvious to you, but for someone not familiar with this person's type of humor, it might not be so obvious. Please consider that if you find yourself making sarcastic jokes in the presence of strangers and they are giving you funny looks. (It's happened to me more than once)

I'm sorry that happens on Spanish Twitter, that's really unfortunate and it sounds like not a fun place to discuss things.

I think there is some confusion here, it's not that there is assumption of ill-intent. It's just the possibility that it could be interpreted that way. From the perspective of a moderator being on the safe side, I could see how they have to always assume that a reader will ignore context, not willfully but by accident.

Edit: Imagine you owned a knife company, would you use the contents of this tweet in an ad? I personally would not.

>This appears to be the slippery slope of freedom of speech we spoke about when people on Twitter were clapping when various people got banned. Enjoy the bed you made for yourselves.

I don't know which people you are talking about specifically or who was clapping, but the slippery slope also goes the other way -- when moderators are afraid to ban people for potentially abusive language then it's very easy for the discourse to start slipping and become toxic. Even if you disagree with twitter's stance, please do your part to ensure that doesn't happen, we all deserve a place where we can be treated respectfully and have intellectually stimulating conversations.

>Something you say jokingly today is almost guaranteed to get you banned in 10 years time when political feelings change and context is removed.

I don't understand what the issue is here, if this is talking about twitter, you can just delete an old tweet if it's upsetting people later. The article even shows how twitter has a process to let you delete the tweet and restore your account.

Just from my own experiences on the net as a teen where jokes about self-harm and suicide were extremely common -- One of those reasons could be because social media is not doing enough to protect children from this type of toxic content. Obviously the deleted tweet here is on the "could be harmless" end of the spectrum of that though.

I don't understand, there's no pretending -- On Twitter, you are effectively talking to the whole world. Anyone in the world can click on your tweets and see what you're saying. If you want to have a broad reach, then minimizing the use of complicated words and language can absolutely help. That doesn't mean you can't discuss complex things, it just means being more deliberate in the way it's discussed.

I don't understand why you are saying that or what that has to do with the conversation. Please imagine a schoolteacher going into a classroom on the first day of school and saying with a straight face to students "I am going to show you a video on how to cut off your leg" or something like that and then not explaining that it's a joke. My original point is not if any given child is competent enough to see the joke or not, but that it could be misinterpreted.

And yet, all of those could be misinterpreted by someone who is not familiar with that.

>I'd be careful before invoking misunderstanding with theoretical groups of non-english speakers.

If you're being cautious (as is common for a large website to do) then this is totally backwards -- you would actually need to be careful with invoking understanding when it comes to theoretical groups of non-english speakers. You can't start by assuming that everything that is said is going to be understood perfectly (Though I really wish that was possible, it would make it a lot easier to teach math, physics, history, etc).

I understand what joke you are trying to make, but I would say the real problem here is the exact opposite: a lot of tweets that I see end up being more ambiguous because of the brevity and lack of context. So it seems what you describe is actually already happening and is one of the main problems with microblogging, and is probably what caused this person's tweet to get flagged.

Sure, but that is not made clear from the joke.

I believe children ages 13-17 are able to use twitter.

Sure. Have you learned a new language recently? If you haven't, it's an illuminating experience -- usually you don't start with the idioms until you have a really strong grasp of the basics and of some other advanced forms.

I can't answer that question because I am a native English speaker, but I can say, I would probably not use that phrase around non-native English speakers. It's confusing and could be misinterpreted. Generally one would want to avoid using idioms like that when trying to cross a language barrier.

Please avoid making these type of snarky comments with (incorrect) assumptions about me. A better way to phrase it would be to ask which persons I know like this, to which I could give a pretty universal response: children. You wouldn't expect a child to understand an adult joke. Sure, some do, but many don't -- they have to learn just like you and I did about what people's attitudes are and when they are joking or not.

Yes, the thing is that Twitter is also accessible to people who are not everyday English speakers.