Twitter shares drop after reporting declining monthly active users

But neither of them, in and of themselves, is abuse. Yes, they might be promulgated in a way that becomes abusive (sending racist opinions repeatedly as you mention, or sending your followers to harass a PR department because they didn't include a trigger warning), but censoring either opinion, outside of abuse, falls into the same trap of playing not the responsible platform, but engaging in censorship. If you consistently censor one and not the other, then you are a biased censor.

Technically speaking they're categorically equivalent in that they're both sanctionable under freedom of speech. From that perspective, whether or not you find one or the other more sanctionable has more to do with your personal opinions than it has to do with accuracy.

Since Twitter is a private organization it can freely decide to curtail freedom of speech on its platform, because that right is not guaranteed (or rather, relevant) in the private sphere. But that puts it into an uncomfortable position because it must then start being opinionated itself. Which opinions are the "right" ones? Which curtails are merely reducing spam and abuse, and which ones are censoring honest but unpopular opinions?

Now that aside, I agree with you that there is a difference between broadcasting unpopular opinions and targeting unpopular opinions towards another person. This makes the situation more difficult for Twitter, but there's a credible argument that curtailing the expression of those opinions in either context is censorship, while curtailing the expression of those opinions in the targeted context is spam and abuse reduction.

Twitter is fully allowed to engage in censorship, but it's probably strictly more beneficial from an inclusionary standpoint to invest in sophisticated tools for empowering users to reduce the spam and abuse targeting them (or which they come across) than it is to invest in sophisticated tools for curtailing "wrong opinions" across the entire platform. Most people can agree on the most extreme opinions that should be censored (though obviously not everyone). But it's hard to make companies the arbiter of which other opinions to get rid of, because from the obvious extreme ones there is a long, long tail of benign opinions that many people will reasonably (and unreasonably) take offense to.

For what it's worth, I think the situation is extremely complex and companies like Twitter are (somewhat unfairly) demonized for not doing enough, or doing too much to reduce the problem. But I don't think there's a substantially easier or more straightforward way of navigating these waters than Twitter has done, given the same capability and information.

No, the popular, "politically correct" opinion has not been in favor of interracial relations for "a century or more".

50 years ago, much of Dr. King's work for human rights was considered by the authorities to be a grave threat to national security that was controlled by the USSR and needed to be "neutralized". Aren't those all criteria that Twitter would accept for banning someone?

Do you think the censors at Twitter have infallable moral compasses that are superior to society's?

Welcome to the real world. Same as it ever was.

Not at all - if one is willing to accept @mention from a random twitter user instead of only from a pre-cleared group of one's contacts, one does not get to post action claim that the @mention of his or her account is abuse because one does not like the content of that mention.

Thank you for saying this. It can't be said enough that the Twitter platform is not a public accomodation, and that Twitter needs to make a choice between banning troll and/or abusive accounts and convincing more valuable people to stay on their platform. We seem to be having a collective problem telling the guy with the chemtrail stories that he's the a-hole even though he strongly believes otherwise.

I came across this: http://ritholtz.com/2018/07/self-inflicted-wounds-drag-faceb... and he also said it well:

"But the bottom line is this: once you welcome holocaust deniers onto to your property, because, Hey! Its just their opinion! you have crossed a certain line. Other people — moral, rational, intelligent human beings who prefer reality to the fake ideological insanity these folks live in — they begin to say good-bye, and in increasingly larger numbers. People like Alex Jones who say Sandy Hook never happened, the birthers 9/11 truthers — thats a dinner party I won’t be attending."

Let's try it with this example. Is someone who genuinely and openly holds the opinion that all men are rapists, but not otherwise engaging in abuse, worth banning?

When we start going down this path of trying to get rid of "undesirables", we start engaging in censorship.

What an absurd statement. There are certainly some nasty subreddits on there, but the site's overall community seems to be 90% or more left-leaning and very anti-racism. And reddit banned most white supremacist and incel subreddits in the past few years.

* Gamers are either tech-savvy or always have friends who are.

* Gamers stick to their small communities and leaders. If you superstar and announce that you're leaving Facebook nobody will follow, but gamers always follow their group / clan / whatever leaders.

* Also there is at least few companies like Valve, Blizzard, Epic Games who hold huge part of the market and have extremely loyal customers. They could certainly manage to set competition for Discord if there will be opening.

I would further observe that in a way, people have more of a shared experience today because of social media & internet in general.

We're still social creatures, just in a different way today. Admittedly, it's different from the days of yore, when people would hang out at the general store (or bar) and chat with the general community of people who passed through. But those days ended long before the Internet came along.