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>> And most of the cases I'm aware of where they've used that power is to suppress viral lies, which is a good thing. Even then they were late pulling the trigg

by ardy42 6y ago

>> And most of the cases I'm aware of where they've used that power is to suppress viral lies, which is a good thing. Even then they were late pulling the trigger. > Why on earth would you suspect that the handful of incidents that they advertise are a remotely representative sample? Of course the highest profile censorship is going to be agreeable, but we have no idea what lurks below the surface because we have no transparency. I'm not so concerned about that, because it's far from the most pressing issue. My impression is that the people who typically complain bitterly about Twitter's "censorship" are complaining about the stuff you call "agreeable censorship" (e.g. driving out Bugaloo Bois, QAnon, COVID misinformation, "stop the steal" cranks, etc.). For instance: the exodus from Twitter to Parler wasn't triggered so much by account closures/tweet deletions, but rather the labeling of election misinformation tweets. > Or we kill Twitter. :) I say this half in-jest, but some people who are positively terrified about the collapse of democracy seem to take it as an article of faith that Twitter deserves to exist. I think there's some happy medium but if we fail to find it dispatching Twitter seems better than where we're heading. I agree with this. Social media may be a technology that society should chose to abandon, Amish-style.

throwaway894345 6y ago
> I'm not so concerned about that, because it's far from the most pressing issue. My impression is that the people who typically complain bitterly about Twitter's "censorship" are complaining about the stuff you call "agreeable censorship" (e.g. driving out Bugaloo Bois, QAnon, COVID misinformation, "stop the steal" cranks, etc.). For instance: the exodus from Twitter to Parler wasn't triggered so much by account closures/tweet deletions, but rather the labeling of election misinformation tweets. There's no reason to believe that this is going to do any good with respect to reducing far-right speech or preventing far-right violence; to the contrary it's going to push them out of public view into increasingly difficult-to-monitor places and fuel a persecution narrative. But much worse than that, we're embracing a precedent that it's okay for a corporation to hold dominion over a significant volume of our collective speech, unregulated. If you would have told me ten years ago that this would be a popular progressive opinion I would have laughed.

by ardy42 6y ago

throwaway894345 6y ago

> I'm not so concerned about that, because it's far from the most pressing issue. My impression is that the people who typically complain bitterly about Twitter's "censorship" are complaining about the stuff you call "agreeable censorship" (e.g. driving out Bugaloo Bois, QAnon, COVID misinformation, "stop the steal" cranks, etc.). For instance: the exodus from Twitter to Parler wasn't triggered so much by account closures/tweet deletions, but rather the labeling of election misinformation tweets. There's no reason to believe that this is going to do any good with respect to reducing far-right speech or preventing far-right violence; to the contrary it's going to push them out of public view into increasingly difficult-to-monitor places and fuel a persecution narrative. But much worse than that, we're embracing a precedent that it's okay for a corporation to hold dominion over a significant volume of our collective speech, unregulated. If you would have told me ten years ago that this would be a popular progressive opinion I would have laughed.