This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. Who knows what would have happened if Trump's twitter account hadn't been banned? Also, it seems a bit off to describe Musk's leadership of Twitter as triggering the return of "the free and open internet".
If deplatforming didn't work, why is the CBS 60 Minutes special being pulled? Why does the US have such an elaborate and far reaching network of financial sanctions, and corresponding anti-BDS laws trying to prevent private organizations from maintaining sanctions of their own? Why do most platforms and payment providers deplatform adult content? And so on.
(The article appears to complain that the John Birch Society were wrongly deplatformed, if you want to know how far out the author is)
If anything, the federal government became even more aggressive in it's censorship efforts under the current administration. Banning individual words in federal reports and grantees publications, pressuring networks to fire program hosts, performatively lawsuits, threatening to pull broadcast licenses and now even censoring an individual CBS story. Things have distinctly escalated.
We occasionally turn off the flags on political/ideological stories when certain conditions are met, such as: (1) there aren't too many of them; (2) the story contains significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...); (3) there's some overlap with intellectual curiosity; (4) we think HN can maybe discuss it substantively; or last but not least, (5) the community is insisting on discussing it. The latter can show up in various ways, such as when the story keeps getting reposted (often from different URLs) or we get lots of emails about it.
Political or ideological opinion pieces rarely meet any of these conditions. That doesn't mean they're bad articles, but it does mean we would reserve the turning-off-flags move (which ought to be fairly rare) for articles that do.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 18.7 ms ] thread(The article appears to complain that the John Birch Society were wrongly deplatformed, if you want to know how far out the author is)
Political or ideological opinion pieces rarely meet any of these conditions. That doesn't mean they're bad articles, but it does mean we would reserve the turning-off-flags move (which ought to be fairly rare) for articles that do.
Does that answer your question?