For example, Twitter bans them from using Twitter, but the /r/The_Donald echo chamber bans anyone with a counter view to their own.
If you want freedom to speak on certain platforms, you need to provide the same rights to everyone.
Besides, it's a long stretch to imagine that right-wing media convinces people to become right-wing. In my case it's rather the opposite: I've been super-over-surcovered with left-wing pro-women communication until my 30s (whether in media or in programmer conferences), I noted that the mantra "Women are oppressed all the time" didn't match what I witnessed in companies (e.g. men from GitHub CEO to Douglas Crockford and all the way down to colleagues are being fired upon unproven accusations by women), which made me investigate the topic only to find that 90% of feminists' arguments are incorrect, which made me search for more reasonable media, aka "right-wing media" according to left-wing media.
Liberals have made a speciality of accusing right-wingers of censorship. That left-wing media like Twitter resorts to censorship only reinforces the perception that the world isn't fair and severely biased with double-standards in favour left-wingers.
If anything, I wish Brexit + Trump meant the end of the ban on some ideas like discussing immigration or men's rights.
What makes it "mandatory" - the fact that they choose not to use an alternative, or the fact that they have not built an alternative?
What's your point, are you saying that new political parties are only allowed to grow if build their own Twitter competitor or have pre-approved ideas?
If this is now "mandatory" for public communication now, I feel that's a huge downgrade from public communication methods in the past.
For discussion, if people, say, tweeted a link to their blog entry with their thoughts, I feel that would be a great use case of Twitter. Unfortunately some chose to do the entire discussion on Twitter. That often ends up poorly.
That's the precise difference.
There are two solutions I envisage for Twitter's behaviour. One is a market solution of people moving away from it (e.g. towards Gab). This might be infeasible due to network effects.
The other is regulation: communication services above a certain size be required to be an open platform. This would still allow twitter to ban people, but anyone would be allowed to re-used Twitter's data feed making it much easier to set up a competitor.
> censorship on Twitter is worse than in a subreddit
Not least because anyone can set up their own subreddit with their own moderation rules.
Which is why everyone should stop using twitter. A private company should never have that much control over critical infrastructure.
My fear here is that Twitter and Facebook are now political machines, even if I agree with what they are doing -generally-. Facebook is cracking down on "fake news," I saw fake news all the time on Facebook, from left (re: vaccines, GMOs, The Kochs) and right (re: Obama, Hillary, Global Warming.)
So, which is Facebook going to crack down on, and which one isn't it going to? I get trolled on Twitter more from the Right, but I do get trolled from the Left as well. Which is Twitter going to crack down on? They don't seem to have an open coherent policy. If I'm harassed by left and right, but I see more of the right being banned, at what point does this stifle speech?
Sure Twitter and Facebook are private companies and can run themselves in whatever manner they wish, but if they -do- have a bias, they should be open about it. If Facebook and Twitter wants to win my trust that they are handling this correctly, they should make the data of their bans public. Even old forums have a ban list and often reasons for bans as public. There is no such public face for these two platforms. They don't even have to have names/handles as public, just a graph that shows the data behind it.
Try to compare like with like. If you're talking about subreddits, is the donald any more of an echo chamber than e.g. shit reddit says? (which AIUI autobans people just for posting on some particular other subreddits). If you're talking about twitter they do seem to be applying different standards for what qualifies as "hate speech" depending where you are on the political spectrum.
Honestly I see a lot of people doing this and agitating for it. Everyone wants a "safe space."
> Several alt-right figures have been suspended from Twitter, but the social network is not saying why
Twitter is not a community, it's a website akin to Reddit which contains communities.
It may bear some consideration that this particular sub-reddit is itself silenced by having its stories removed from the front page by algorithm, which to me represents as great a sin or greater.
That being said, I'm okay with that. It's not a place for reasonable discussion, it's just shitpostland.
However. Twitter prides itself on being a serious social network with considerations for free speech and the "new media"... being banned from something like that just because of what you believe is silly.
Now, I think their viewpoints are disgusting too. But their views don't affect people, their actions do.
I can't, for the life of me, understand how you can't find evidence (example of Alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos):
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/leslie-jones-twitter-tro...
Now, whether he should be banned for what he did is up for contention. But he knows what he did, and he knows how he attacked her.
I mean, it's in their sidebar... "No Dissenters".
- No Dissenters or SJWs. AfterBerners MUST Assimilate.
See rule iv.
> No Dissenters or SJWs. AfterBerners MUST Assimilate
If they started banning your Reddit account for being a communist, I imagine a lot of people - including "The Donald" - would be angry.
Twitter is a platform. Your analogy would be more akin to Reddit banning a subreddit-- which happens. I personally disagree with platforms like google, reddit & twtr editoralizing & policing things like ideology & expression. I certainly lean more libertarian here, but actions like this certainly are a slippery slope. It appears like favoritism in a benevolent view and censorship in a more hard line stance
These are subreddits with their own admins managing them. Twitter as a company is banning users from their entire platform. The equivalent would be Reddit as a company banning very liberal users.
Twitter is effectively the digital commons, run by a professional organization.
A subreddit is a subsection of a reddit, a website that lets any user roll up with a clowncar of mods and claim some land within their namespace.
When you know there are super PACs literally spending millions of dollars to manipulate people on sites like Reddit, and other subreddits (like /r/HillaryClinton) also ban all dissenting opinions, why would you leave yourself so vulnerable to attack? Just so you can brag about occupying the moral high ground?
Reddit's completely opaque, volunteer moderator system guarantees that every single subreddit is biased in one way or another. /r/The_Donald was only doing what was necessary to create a community where people could discuss Trump without being berated and silenced by downvotes.
You can more-or-less do that on Reddit.
"I believe people's sexual preferences are private and the state should not interfere in it."
"I believe homosexuality is a crime and all gay men should be killed".