While some may welcome the mechanism deployed against Berger’s trolls as a step in the right direction, the move is troubling to free speech advocates. Many of the proposals to deal with online abuse clash with Twitter’s once-vaunted stance as “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” but this particular instance seems less like an attempt to navigate between free speech and user safety, and more like a case of exceptionalism for a politician whose abuse has made headlines in the United Kingdom. The filter, which Twitter has not discussed publicly, does not appear as if it’s intended to be a universal fix for harassment that is experienced by less-important users on the platform, such as the women targeted by Gamergate.
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