Not any more since the last wave of closing "alleged ISIS" accounts. I can't stand those religious retards either, but banning people just because they follow a religious cult of killers who spread hate and murder threats?

You could use the same argument to ban practically everything... including followers of Donald "Muslims out!!!" Trump, Frauke "Shoot refugees at the border" Petry, Recep Tayyip "Kurd Killer" Erdogan or whoever is the King of Saudi Arabia.

None of these groups are in any danger to be banned from popular social media sites despite their ideology being very similar (or, in case of Saudi Arabia, identically) to the IS and their followers equally murderish and morally depraved (Erdogan, Saudi Arabia, the neo-Nazis burning refugee camps down in Germany).

It's inconsequent and the mere possibility of banning someone over anything that members of another (whiter? religious-er?) group are allowed to do opens up highly complex moral issues.

I dunno man—when you put it like that, it sounds like a pretty great idea.

Because they're white, because they're allied with the West or what?

Political bigotry at its finest. Either you tell ALL the radicals to fuck off or none at all.

I am tired of these all-or-nothing discussions that seem commonplace nowadays. The world is not as brightly defined as you think it is. We can make forward progress progressively.

A federated, open twitter platform would be better. Ideal, in fact. If twitter the company were merely an operator in such a network, i would not take much issue with them banning people i personally would evict from my social spheres.

i mean, i agree with you in that the other examples you mentioned are all objectionable to me too and i think a moral justification for banning ISIS accounts can be extended to those cases. it doesn't matter what they say the reasoning is, the underlying mechanism is a power struggle between extremely large and grotesque power structures.

Federated platforms don't work. We've seen them fail with OpenID, Persona, Usenet and email; I'm stretching the definition of failed a bit with the latter two but Usenet is a spam- and warez-filled shadow of what it once was and email, well, if you're not one of the bigger email service providers good luck ensuring reliable delivery of your messages due to spam, and that IS failure in my eyes.

At a certain scale all services, centralized or federated, require massive amounts of money simply to maintain the infrastructure and to prevent "account rot".

Without ads there is no monetizing in free federated services, that is why Persona and OpenID failed.

They're not actually banning those ISIS accounts, they're just banning people who "harass" (read: interact with) high profile accounts. This is hitting the national consciousness with the "BernieBro" narrative, where high profile journalists are finally being told their shit stinks and are trying to cast such disagreements as ban-worthy harassment.

A good example was a particular account (@swarthyvillian) was receiving literal death threats from a Syria Liberation Army account for, I kid you not, disagreements on MMA rankings. Several weeks later the same guy was banned after linking to tweets by Arthur Chu and Sady Doyle for "pile on harassment" because his followers said mean (and admittedly colorful) things in response.

The SLA account is still active.