Otherwise Twitter is interfering in foreign diplomacy and governments, be they legal, illegal, authoritarian or democratic.
Twitter should not be making these calls. This is a decision for the State Department to make.
> Twitter should not be making these calls.
Twitter should totally should be making the calls. If the CCP wants to put a big propaganda poster in my front yard "for diplomatic reasons," I'd tell them to fuck off. Neither I nor Twitter have any obligation to carry the messages of any regime.
If they want to do diplomacy, they can send a representative to the State Department. If their government wants to communicate, let it use mechanisms it actually controls.
I disagree with that strongly. If it was the State Department's decision, I'd have to host the CCP's propaganda in my yard until State Department told me to take it down.
Twitter isn't interfering with government-to-government diplomacy, so there's no diplomatic issue here.
Can Twitter ban members of protected classes if they don’t ban all members of a protected class, can the coffee shop do the same?
And being a member of a protected class doesn't mean you can't be banned for terms of service violations. You are just throwing legal sounding words together like a random word generator.
Is that a controversial opinion?
This is giving Twitter way too much credit (and too much power). When did a stupid 280chr “microblogging” platform become a channel for foreign diplomacy? To make an absurd comparison, should we consider the politics subreddit a diplomatic venue too?
Approximately in 2009. That's the date of the first known public example of the State Department influencing Twitter operations for diplomatic purposes. In that case, it was to lobby Twitter to delay a scheduled shutdown because of events happening in Iran.
> To make an absurd comparison, should we consider the politics subreddit a diplomatic venue too?
Any highly trafficked site co-ordinated and administered in the United States is, yes.
This is basically whining about the actions of mods on a free web forum.
Maybe governments shouldn't be using some poorly run private sector web site to communicate with the public.
FWIW, I think you are confusing what is legally permissible today with the normative statement by GP that Twitter shouldn't be the one making these calls.
People need to stop acting like Twitter is supposed to act as an organ of the US government.
If you walk into my bar and start screaming racist nonsense, I am well within my rights to ask you to leave the bar, and I do not have to let you back in. That doesn’t also suddenly make me liable for the nonsense you spewed.
The entire point of section 230 is to enable editorial control so long as you aren't the content creator/submitter without the kinds of civil liability tied to “publisher” status otherwise, for both platforms and users on those platforms who are empowered to act in ways which have editorial impact.
And a one-sentence “you can't do X and Y” isn't really a substantive argument against Section 230.
Your understanding is wrong. They receive liability protection for editorial decisions as a means of removing the disincentive for them to exercise editorial control that would otherwise exist.
Nope, publishers often (sometimes with explicit notice to avoid doubt) publish things they disagree with because they think there is value in publishing it. They often also exercise their free speech/press rights to not publish other things they disagree with, even if they are submitted to them for publication.
It would be, except for Section 230’s explicitly carveout of most civil liability as a publisher for online publishers (whether other users or platform operators) to the extent they are moderating/curating user-generated content, rather than producing/submitting content.
The act of choosing to use (or not use) ones resources to relay speech is, yes, an act of free speech (or perhaps more precisely free press, though the two are generally treated as a single right under the name “speech” for most purpose).
> Twitter is not an editor
It is, except for some civil liability purposes because of the specific Section 230 carveout for curated/moderated content which is user generated, a publisher. The choice to publish content, or not, is a speech/press act.