Twitter Files Part 4
twitter.com
twitter.com
There's no constitutional right to make companies carry your voice & these entities can & should make decisions for themselves as the need arises & as they see fit. There should also be more competitors & outlets, so we arent in this position of obsessing about one company's choices, so we arent so fixated.
Finding a bunch of conservative instigators to feed the files to, to deliberately damage & sabotage the history here,... this is all pretty scummy.
Ok so it's fine to start carte blanche censoring liberals?
A smarter question is how that impacts the desire of most people to be on the site. Twitter’s rules were focused on behavior which most people find offensive rather than political viewpoints, and that meant that lots of people wanted to be there. The sites which only allow certain viewpoints tend to be a lot less enjoyable, and usually end in infighting as the purists turn on each other. Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be a bad business move to limit your potential user base and exclude advertisers who aren’t exclusively targeting that same narrow demographic.
The banning of Donald Trump was very arbitrary and involved a lot of 'mind reading' and 'fortune telling'. This is clear from the justification:
> After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.
In a way this justification is always trivially true. Trump could always have a seizure or someone could hack his account and if your redline is zero risk of incitement then this redline is always being breached. But of course twitter is not going to try and quantify the risk because if you applied this crazy level (or some level that is less crazy) to any other politician then people will wonder why Trump is being singled out.
Was the risk of violence from Trump continuing to tweet higher than other Democratic politicians from continuing to tweet during the BLM riots? More people were killed during the BLM violence than the 'election denying' violence. Seems a bit suspect that one resulted in politicians being banned while another didn't.
If I was running twitter my standard would be the US incitement to violence standard which would mean Trump wouldn't be banned nor would any Democratic politician.
Trump was singled out, he was allowed to get away with shit for far too long because Twitter didn't want to deal with the hassle that banning him would cause even though he broke their policy often