Twitter says it will judge verified users’ offline behavior
theverge.com
theverge.com
Which is ironic, given the subject of your criticism.
Asserting that they should not be able to do so is, in fact, an argument against freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is not an entitlement to have other people use their resources to further your speech irrespective of their own preferences.
Getting the legal benefits of being a modern public square but then also being able to silence people to improve your profit margin is where this seems to be the problem
I don't see anything about Twitter in the 1st Amendment.
I'm not sure how anybody is being censored here -- given that we are only debating verification. People are not deprived off their speech. Second, for instance in the cases of people penalized after this new policy, some of them (Jason Kessler for instance) were responsible for real world violence.
I personally think that this was a long overdue move for twitter. We've fought long and hard to discredit neo-Nazi ideas and ideals and to welcome them back in the town square as if anything they have to say is worth listening to is just absurd.
I think Sartre said it best:
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of
the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks
are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing
themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use
words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-
Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with
discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit
the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in
acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by
sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you
press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent,
loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument
is past."That said, we need to take back control from the big platforms & corporations - dominant channels of public discourse shouldn't be subject to random whims & fancies, regardless of public/private ownership. You don't want to see Nazi content on Twitter, don't follow Nazis. Or, request a content filter from Twitter, though that still doesn't eliminate Nazis from the world - it just puts you deeper in your echo chamber. But punitive action against people you disagree with is simply unacceptable!
Where your argument falls down is in just reducing this to "people you disagree with." Nazis (even lately) have been responsible for more than just polite disagreements.
For instance Jason Kessler one of the neo-Nazis/white-supremacists was involved in the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville which devolved into violence and one death.
Free speech absolutism [1] is good, but I draw the line at speech leading to violence.
[1] Sidepoint, but framing this as a free speech question is IMO disingenuous because nobody's speech is being taken away here. Just verification from twitter.
However, I notice that you don't have much to say about my argument against speech leading to violence. What do you think about that.
Given the subjective nature of the test there will be cases when it's less clear cut. But I think that's better than status quo.
The problem is Twitter doesn't "verify" people equally. There should be a process that is the same for "Donald Trump," "Kim Kardassian West," and "My child's fifth grade teacher."
Since they can't or won't do that, becoming verified also involves a bit of Wikipedia's Notable policy. Except that it seems to favor high-traffic accounts. (So no checkmark for my kid's teacher, but yes checkmark for neo-Nazis.)
So now they aren't really "verfiying" users, they're just rewarding high-traffic users that are notable.
That said, this may work a bit better than removing the checkmark for something they said on the actual site. In those cases, the affected person could simply say their account's been hacked and have no one really be any the wiser.