“Twitter hosts a #KillTrump hashtag. In all of the glorious English language there is no clearer, plainer, or shorter way to call for violence than the word kil

“Twitter hosts a #KillTrump hashtag. In all of the glorious English language there is no clearer, plainer, or shorter way to call for violence than the word kill followed by someone’s name. But there it is...And this isn’t new, back in June the hashtag #AssassinateTrump was bouncing around the website with gems like “Someone take this clown out NOW.” That tweet is still up.” I worry about the ability to evenhandedly censor at scale, but the content examples above should be pretty easy to automate the cleansing of if one wanted to. I’m curious how many would bet (and how) regarding Twitter’s reaction if #killbi*den or assassination-focused alternatives became a thing this spring. We don’t need to speculate about dissemination of ideas - hypotheses harmful to Trump (Russian collusion) are left alone for years, while hypotheses critical of Biden (grifter schemes involving his son) get prominently deplatformed, not just modded with a disclaimer. Both were legitimate news stories, both warranted the public interest, and both involved government investigation. To be clear, I’m all for Twitter’s right to do this. Wholeheartedly. I chaff at the promoted perception that they are even-handed in toeing a moral line simply because a) it seems demonstrably false with even casual examination by an honest broker, and b) it forestalls conversation about their behavior as a market actor. The bigger concern here isn’t Twitter’s own social alignments, but the barriers they and other gatekeepers evidently can enforce to bar competition. It’s interesting that the market competition in this age seems to be aligning with a competition of ideas, because otherwise I’m not sure this would ever come to a head. To the extent that there’s a public policy issue that needs examining here, I think it’s somewhere in that ball of string: section 230 probably assumed that the Internet would not be run (for all intents and purposes of being an accessible public forum) by oligopolies: nor that so few organizations would have such massive vertical and horizontal leverage. I don’t tend to think that section 230 reform is a good idea, but am inclined to think that this week’s display of power begs for some trust busting. So what happens when the targets of such examination have traded staff with the political administration, and have such stratospheric piles of cash? The laws are in place - it’s hard to call Twitter, et al innocent monopolies anymore.