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https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1601720455005511680.html

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.

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Yes much much higher. Trump was praising a violent coup.

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

Sounds like Elon is ok with civil war as long as it’s tweeted. I don’t know why any ceo would want to be part of Jan 6 like event in any capacity regardless of politics.
consequences isn’t silencing people… I don’t think we should want a world where people bigger / stronger / richer than you or me can do whatever to our detriment. If you disagree let’s do something about legal system first then worry about social media.
I'm not worried about social media, and even though I think its highlights often the vapid and banality of our societies, I'm not going try to stop someone from waddling in the cesspool.

>I don’t think we should want a world where people bigger / stronger / richer than you or me can do whatever to our detriment.

What "we" want, matters not. I have no desire to change the course of a legal system. People bigger / stronger / richer than you or me try everyday to influence all sorts of decisions i make, some important me, some not so important to me. I'm not going to rely upon a legal system to instill some misguided sense of protection from them on the ones I find most important to me and will take matters into my own hands, no matter how futile it will be.

So you’d honestly want social media to be more like legal system than both being better? Personally I’d like to see more optimism in the world.
Your optimism is reliant upon the threat of force on peoples actions... lol

I'd think i'm plenty optimistic, just not in legal systems. Decentralized permissionless systems make me very optimistic.

ok so again, you want to allow people with power to have a system more like the legal system. A powerful person can insight a mob attack on twitter, (breaking it's own rules) because he's powerful.

I'm just suggesting that rules should be uniform. If you or I can't do it he shouldn't be able to do it. They had rules, if they don't agree with those rules, remove them. But then everyone else can swat, or doxx or other kind of terrible actions - which is a hellscape not a town square.

Law isn't equal, but really should be.

> ok so again, you want to allow people with power to have a system more like the legal system.

Where the hell did I say that? If anything, nothing is stopping you from doing research, putting a hole in such a powerful person, dumping your cig ash on them. Sure, there might be consequences for you. But those powerful people who do something you don't like will learn that they cannot expect to abuse a system and always get away from it. A temporary hellscape, to keep those "in power" in check.

If you wanna waste your time with the legal system (which also creates a temporary hellscapes, but under terms that you believe in) because of your faith in what it should be, be my guest.

One would be a fool if one thinks that stopping someone from supposedly inciting w/e on some social media platform will magically solve the underlying problems (like, why would so many people even listen to this person in fhe first place if they were placated and happy? totally not possible for them to eventually find someone else who says some similar shit to go to ends of the earth for... lol). And even more of a fool if one thinks a nations laws will be sufficient (even at some idealized level to whatever scale your belief in it is maximized). I'll protect my self from such fools, esp if they come at me personally with that nonsense.

In the mean time, ill help other people have the same means as I do so they can fight their own battles, whatever those happen to be (at least those who have grown tired trying to outsource it to people).

Incredible crybabying. Never going to stop.

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.

> There's no constitutional right to make companies carry your voice

Ok so it's fine to start carte blanche censoring liberals?

It’s legal, and it already happens on sites like Parler or Truth Social.

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.

Twitter censors liberals and leftists all the time. They just don't raise aa big of a stink about it as conservatives. Part of it is working the refs and part is the large increase in racist and conspiracy theories among right wing people in recent times.
The engagement declines with each new release. That is what happens when you keep crying wolf. It's not even trending on Twitter.
Is there anything new here? This seems like it’s confirming the general public understanding before — Trump was given considerable leeway as a world leader, but when the January attack happened there was internal discussion which led to an executive decision that they didn’t want to continue hosting him. Now we have more Slack messages but it doesn’t seem like they change anything substantially.
Musk is trying to appeal to right wing grifter supporters here capable of believing in QAnon. It doesn't need to make sense to everyone.
Yeah, it’s disappointing to see it here without context or analysis. Watching people pretend not to know that every popular social network has tools like this or that it’s a secret has been sad.