People love having their speech limited, I'm sure this will work out great for twitter.
ETA: some people made some comments below this that made me want to clarify a few things:
1) Twitter being publicly traded does not automatically make them beholden to every person on Earth, especially in matters of free speech. They're still allowed governing their platform in whatever way they see fit.
2) a better analogy might be a comedy club on open mic nigh.t. If you get up on stage and start making racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. Jokes the club owner has every right to throw you out. Yes, it's a public forum, but limiting your use of what is ultimately a private (i.e. not government owned) establishment does not constitute a violation of your rights unless it can be proven that you were denied access due to your membership in a protected class, or based on your gender, etc. Free speech doesn't protect you from (peaceful and appropriate) backlash.
I firmly believe that if something becomes as big as twitter (facebook, google, amazon, ...), it becomes infrastructure and should be subject to similar rules as the government. It should no longer be treated like that mom and pop groceries store.
It took people centuries to wrangle civil rights (including free speech and parliamentary representation) from their states - in that process changing them into democracies. Before, all of that was completely unheard of. I wonder if in future, people will fight the same way for free speech on Twitter, universal access to Amazon's shipping infrastructure, the right to be indexed (or forgotten) on Google, and so on.
They are talking about the comedy club where the owner permanently bans anyone who makes jokes on certain topics. People stop going to it.
Which I think Twitter is going to have to have some standards about what sort of behavior they allow, it's just that there is risk of going too far and making the platform boring and useless. Banning accounts used for harassment is not going too far. Banning accounts because some arbitrary number of people don't like what they say probably is.
I think you mean public company. They went public a few years ago.
I'm not talking about free speech. This is a company that didn't censor <x>, deciding to censor <x>. I'm sure the users that discussed/read/were-interested-in <x> will be thrilled. That is all.
I love having hate speech limited, if that's what you mean.
It's seems disingenuous for you to conflate them.
I didn't know that hashtag and was not surprised to see that one of its regular users is someone who likes to use autism as a metaphor for men working in tech.
It is just like everyone who is rioting with slogans like 'not my President.' These same people were giving Trump a hard time when he said the election system was rigged and didn't enthusiastically say he would support the results of the election. The left is doing a good job reenforcing the exact image many people voted against. The elitist attitude of tolerance unless disagreed with.
EDIT
Thanks for the downvotes and further proving my point. I would never vote for Trump, but simply pointing out hypocrisy and double standards does get people upset.
Twitter has failed to do so here and is showing a blatant political statement (unless there were specific cases of harassment with these people or something, in which case I may be overstepping).
I think generally views like this are better left in the spotlight of the public where they can be properly argued with and not dragged into private forums and facebook feeds where it's much harder for people to see a wider response to them. Banning them is harmful to people who are getting a casual interest in their ideas and start reading up on it. When the only place they can do that is Breitbart or similar, how do you think that'll go?
Everyone keeps making comments like this. "This is a massive injustice! Unless Twitter was justified idk."
Maybe we should wait for a statement from Twitter before passing judgment.
Which is a shame, because if they're banning a bunch of abusive harassing arseholes that's a good thing and I want to know about it.
My problem is so much of what goes on in these public message boards is not fact-based. Alt right groups pander to people's irritations and insecurities in a million small ways. They blatantly lie about individuals or scenarios. They set up straw men, then demonize and demolish them with words like 'cuck' and 'illegal' to inflame their readers, even when the people they're discussing are not those things at all. And when they're confronted with a dissenting viewpoint, they ignore it and move to the next. It is literally impossible for rational individuals to have discussions with them.
I think part of the problem is people don't tend to internalize lessons taught by others without respect for that person, and on the internet, everyone is a stranger. I don't want this kind of speech banned because it's offensive - I want it banned because its nonsensical, it enrages people only looking for a reason to be angry, it gives a platform to people that can't even defend their views without resorting to constant insults, it's a waste of time. That's probably my lack of caffeine talking, though.
With the right of free speech comes the responsibility to extend that speech to others. Because if we leave who is heard to simply "who can speak the loudest", we won't find out when we're wrong.
See also: Mill's "On Liberty", available now in every Intro to Philosophy textbook.