Do you think they should unban people who threaten to rape and kill people because they disagree about video games? If so, why?
As a nonprofit organization? Yes, absolutely they should. They should allow users to form groups and better curate their own feed, assisted by algorithms, and essentially let the people who want to say terrible things say terrible things and let the people who don't want to read it block them.
This is essentially the same fight about what "The Internet" should be that has been going on since the Usenet heyday. We do have to realize now, though, that there are no benevolent corporations who want what is best for the Internet. We have to advocate for that ourselves.
If you don't care about people saying offensive things, you just don't subscribe to any ban lists. Or maybe only subscribe to spam ban lists.
Personally, I like the concept of outsourcing the policing/moderation of a community to the community itself. I think what online forums do by promoting moderators from the long time, trusted user base is a step in the right direction. The upvote/downvote system on HN, where the downvoted stuff gets increasingly more difficult read, is even better.
To that end, showing people the door seems eminently reasonable. You aren't going to actually be able to visit upon them the prosecution (again, for literal and extant crimes) that they have earned for themselves, but you can, and IMO should, cut them out of the social universe that you undertake to create and protect.
I believe dealing with newly generated accounts can be dealt with as a separate problem, distinct from the community at large. Reputation and filtering messages/content, and or restrictions based on account age are some examples.
If you don't think there can be any consequences for free speech on the internet, then I don't see how you can give any credibility to threats of violence, which you can simply block out yourself instead of having to have big brother do it for you.
That way you don't have to interact with people you don't want to.
Doing that will absolutely land you in a criminal court. 'She doesn't have to look at it' won't be a great defense, either.
Words have consequences, and centuries of precedent and legislature have established them.
You can write a sellable poem that people like about wine, all its good and (mostly) bad. But good luck selling a poem about sucralose or aspartame.
Because they are arbitrarily applied based on ideological lines and what your caste is in progressive caste system. I see tons of accounts asking for Donald Trump to be anally raped but none of them are suspended.
Why do you support this gross and repulsive censorship?
What are your thoughts on why Twitter choose not to do that?
Can you provide links to these threatening tweets? I will happily report them right now.
Now, can you please provide those threatening tweets? I would like to report them.
"Just block them", it's easy when there's one or two accounts being dicks. It's much more difficult when 4chan's recruited 50,000 accounts to be dicks.
At some point, and I'd personally argue that that point was a few years ago now, you take the gloves off and start eighty-sixing the bad actors.
(She, of course, did take it seriously; she crashed on friends' couches for a few weeks while she found a new place to live. And she is not the only one by a long shot; this is totally a just and equitable punishment for being a woman on the Internet, though, I guess.)
EDIT: OK, I've done some quick reading, and "anodyne"? Are you serious? I have no opinion on whether McCain should be shown the door from Twitter, but dude, if you think a neo-Confederate and active white supremacist is "anodyne", either I am vastly underestimating the rot in the right wing of American politics or you do not live in anything within fridge-tossing distance of the real world. (But, then again, Trump.)
"Twitter mostly only bans people throwing around death threats"
to,
"well this one guy once wrote some bad stuff under a pseudonym in another forum, and this other guy has rude followers"
Do you see why people might not exactly trust Twitter's commitment to being a content-neutral platform, or why they might be reluctant to give them huge amounts of free content and network effects that can be taken out at a whim?
Now, as to your eliding of actual malicious intent: pointing the Eye of Sauron at people, when you know-and-can't-not-know that your followers will deluge whoever you point at with death and rape threats, is not, in my book, merely "having rude followers". It is intentionally trying to harm somebody. And this is what Milo did, regularly, on Twitter--while he finally picked on a celebrity who had the social standing to hit back, he would regularly retweet some nobody who never said anything to him to his followers and let the head-hunting commence. You should be judged for that, and you shouldn't be allowed to continue harming people. So yeah, I'm OK with him being kicked to the curb.
But I'm gonna be honest: given the way you're writing about all of this, you should be reluctant to use Twitter. You should leave Twitter. I think that's a great idea. I entreat you to definitely, without a question, leave and start your own thing. And maybe you'll prove me wrong, that this land of ponies is so much better for everyone, instead of just the swarms of abusers--but I doubt it. So go get started! I look forward to seeing it.
Given the left's continuing efforts to restrict freedom of association, I don't find myself under any obligation to respect their desire to exclude people of my ideological persuasion from any given platform.
Ironically Twitter's censorship efforts are just barely effective enough to drive respectable, real-name conservatives off of their platform, but laughably underpowered against dedicated trolls. If anything it's giving them a nice lesson in disposable identities and minor opsec.