They blocked the account but as you can see from the bottom of the screenshot in the article the account could be reinstated by deleting the tweet in question. If the author is honestly saying they no longer stand by what they posted 9 years ago they could easily just delete it and move on.

That raises a bunch of different questions about what Twitter are doing to change history, and the way they represent their platform, but those are separate to the banning of users based on their history.

Besides, this might be motivated by Twitter acting on a complaint. It could be that Sarah Palin (or someone representing her) complained about the tweet recently, in which case Twitter need to deal with that now.

Exactly. This is all beyond ridiculous. The harm to the author is minimal. Just remove the tweet, tweet out a link to this very blog post, and be done with it. Twitter has no interest in thought control, nor capability to do it. They just don't like hosting garbage like the Palin tweet that will come back to embarrass them.

There is a very reasonable middle ground here. No one is demanding we all submit to corporate thought police. No one is being shunned from social media access without recourse. Just make a minimal effort to conform to routine societal decorum, and you can shit on Sarah Palin all you want.

I'll go one step further: by forcing them to act upon it, instead of deleting/hiding it and notifying the user, Twitter is engaging in behavioral training, like you would train a dog.

Asking someone to do something is not behavioural training. The sort of training you're talking about only works by repetition of the behaviour and reward interaction, and there's no evidence that Twitter will be repeating this over and over again for each user. That's just nonsense.

Twitter could, of course, have just given a warning. But I also don't see any problem treating the tweet as if it were current. The age of the tweet does not change whether it is acceptable or not, does it?

Well, he was banned for violating the Twitter rules, and those rules didn't exist at the time.

Getting a message saying something like "this message violates the rules today, so we're going to delete it" or "delete this message within a week or we'll have to ban your account" would seem more reasonable to me than immediate ex post facto enforcement.

I assumed that the comment had already violated rules at that time and simply was not recognized or discovered as such a violation earlier.

That’s interesting question. Following this principle, should we ban historical books that suggest to e.g. kill self-claimed witches, treat nonbelievers as second-class people and so on?

If someone calls you a racial slur, is it ok to wait nine years and then punch him in the face?

This isn’t really a punch in the face though, is it? If someone discovered you used racial slurs nine years ago, I think they would be justified in choosing to no longer associate with you or ask you to recant what you had said in the past.

>It is definitely an immature tweet, however I think 9 years can change a person a lot.

Absolutely, I have blog posts from 2001 I leave up that are absolutely horrid.

In 2001 I was a 16 year old, who's father had died 12 days before his 13th birthday and was moved to another school a few months later where he had no friends and fell in with the punk/goth crowd. I didn't care about school, all I cared about was music and getting high or running around shows or the mall while tripping. I said stupid shit on livejournal under a username only my friends knew, mostly complaining about my mother and school. I now host those on RyanMercer.com, wholly attributed to me.

That's who I was when I was 16, it's not who I am now.

Now I post about problems we face as a civilization, I post about things that interest me, I post about things that scare me, I post about how we need to come together and put aside foolish things to focus on ensuring a better future for ourselves and our offspring but I'm not going to hide who I was 18 years ago. Now I put thought into my posts, I don't rush to a computer to type "oh my god I hate them all blah blah blah raging against society", I'm not going to try and cover that up as that's part of my experience, who I was is part of who I am, if anything it shows that people can mature.