Microblogging come messaging service Twitter, Inc. has upped the ante in its pursuit of turning the service into a safe space with a new “Trust & Safety Council” that could have easily come out of a George Orwell book.

In an announcement about the new council, Twitter’s Head of Global Policy Outreach Patricia Cartes justified the move on social justice warrior grounds, stating that for users to express themselves “freely and safely” (emphasis is ours) on Twitter, the company must provide “more tools and policies” to stifle speech that those of the cause find offensive.

“With hundreds of millions of Tweets sent per day, the volume of content on Twitter is massive, which makes it extraordinarily complex to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power,” she added. “It requires a multi-layered approach where each of our 320 million users has a part to play, as do the community of experts working for safety and free expression.”

The Trust & Safety Council will allegedly allow Twitter to “tap into the expertise and input of organizations at the intersection of these issues more efficiently and quickly,” and includes safety advocates, academics, and researchers, grassroots advocacy organizations, and community groups who focus on the need to prevent abuse, harassment, and bullying.

Groups who are part of the council include a mixed bag of those who actually do good in the community, and those who simply hate men; for example Beyond Blue, a group that deals with depression and does great community work in raising awareness, and GLAAD, who does amazing things in promoting LGBT acceptance, are listed besides Anita Sarkeesian’s misandrist organization Feminist Frequency.

Block this

The move by Twitter to further police speech which doesn’t agree with its social justice worldview doesn’t come as a surprise and follows on from the possible news earlier this week that they were planning to control what content appears in people’s timelines by implementing an algorithmic timeline, ostensibly to censor speech that they don’t want people to read.

This is a company so obsessed with political correctness that it literally believes the only way to save its sinking business (it’s currently losing users) is to create a “safe space” where those it doesn’t agree with can’t speak freely.

There’s absolutely no surprise that Twitter’s stock price keeps dropping and given the constant failures at the company it’s likely that the fall down the cliff still has a long way to go.

At the end of the day, and never seemingly mentioned by Twitter and it’s cohort social justice warriors, is that if you don’t like what someone is saying on the service, block them, it’s one easy click that is apparently a step too far for those who act like children and maintain a constant status of being professional victims.

Image credit: bitboy/Flickr/CC by 2.0