This is certainly a great news for so-called “regulators” in countries that are still controlled by military regimes and those who are opposed to free speech. Although Twitter only mentioned countries such as Germany and France, featuring laws prohibiting pro-nazi speech, the feature will be warmly welcomed by many other regimes around the world. While stopping pro-nazi hate speech might be a worthwile feature in the social network, the feature certainly has other uses, just like anti hate speech laws could be used against people advocating social change.

The changes in Twitter is clearly a move to appease speech regulators around the world, which once again poses the question of public needs vs private ownership of networks such as Twitter.

The work basically plays around with the idea of the association that we form between words and images. Putting words next to an image can suddenly shift the meaning of the image, since meaning in an image is quite subjective in a lot of ways. My idea was to create something that is constantly changing according to the data that it can gather. It is by no means some form of AI application. Quite the opposite. The application itself is really quite simple.

Hope you enjoy, here is the link http://www.agit8.org/the_association_of_meaning