It's just an elaborate form of calling somebody stupid by implying that they don't consciously think about their decisions by means of having an inner dialogue. For twitter to ban this is weird but hey, I guess they are moving more towards the european model of free speech if they aren't already there.

> These accounts posed as liberal activists and were used to spread — among other things — false information about November’s midterm elections

Which violates the Twitter policy against intentionally misleading election content. Pretty straight forward.

So basically satire banned on Twitter, if it comes from the right. These accounts were in no way misleading; one would never confuse them for actual liberal activists.

There's plenty of satire left out there. What isn't satire or useful is misleading information about how/when to vote etc.

While your answer is reducible to "yes" in this case, I think the NPC meme is just the inverted Russian bot meme. If one qualifies as misleading information, the other should be scrutinized as well.

Although the NPC case is probably about some random people on twitter that like to make fun of some targets, the story about Russians seems to have more involved actors.

It's not the satire/joke that's getting banned, we know this because there's still NPC account doing the same joke so it's not just the joke that brought down the hammer.

What got those 1500 banned were tweets like "Get out and vote November 7th!" 1 day after the actual date of Nov 6th and the boosting and retweeting among all the accounts.

Thanks. This is logical.

Pretty sure like 0.001% of those accounts did that. But it's a good excuse, granted.

I think the real reason they got banned is that under every tweet of every blue-checkmark liberal on Twitter you'd find dozens of replies of accounts called NPC209834029 with the same avatar nodding and saying the same platitudes. But of course, when all the replies to all Trump tweets are from blue-checkmarks shitting on him, Twitter doesn't seem to care. :P I think neither should be banned, but I guess they know better.

From the article, spreading misleading voter information, which could cause voters to miss the date.

Sigh. So people who would normally vote liberal are now going to vote on the wrong day because they got the election day date from a troll account mocking their liberal position--and they didn't bother to remember that elections are always on Tuesdays or to use google?

I guess Twitter found the potential negatives of allowing voter suppression campaigns on their platform (no matter how ineffectual you think they are) are greater than the benefits of allowing people to carry them out 'because free speech.'

It's basically propaganda. Propaganda is generally agreed to be a bad thing for a true democracy.

Actually, propaganda is agreed to be a good thing for a democracy. It's why we have free press and free speech laws.

Many of the founders ran printing presses or newspapers to push their own propaganda. The most prominent being alexander hamilton and the NY Post.

What is bad for democracy is censorship ( aka one sided propaganda ).

It is no more propaganda than #maga or #orangecheeto or #impeachtrump. It is political satire and commentary.

Propaganda for what?

How in the world is criticizing the capacity of a persons ability to critically think by using memes Propaganda.

I'm right wing and I find the boxed responses from leftest to line up with some of the NPC stuff I saw.