I am interested in what you think about that, ignoring Trump for a second.
In that context I’m totally fine with what Twitter did. However, maybe something that looks superficially similar (posting a link to some white supremacist website below a tweet of some politician) might not be.
I know that looks pretty similar but I think that those are the complexities our society has to deal with. Sometimes someone is just wrong and their wrongness is fucking dangerous to society and then it is ok to react.
No bright line, only complexities.
My argument is Twitter is a private company. While private company should be able to control what happens with their platform, they have increasingly reached a size where they are public utilities. I believe an elected government (with its own biases) should decide what goes on a published platform than twitter. Because i have no way of questioning Twitter’s decisions. I can question the government and elect a new one. I can’t elect a new Jack Dorsey.
Every court’s jurisdiction only applies within that country.
What if an American court’s order goes against a European one?
What if Twitter moves to a different jurisdiction which has less oversight and buys out the courts? Not probable. But I wouldn’t want a utility to have so much power. Sorry.
That’s what they have done in the past and what is a direct reaction to what went down during the last US presidential election.
Since this is the President Twitter feels understandably uncomfortable with just banning that person, so the next best option is to provide context to what they said. Seems reasonable to me.
You can quibble about details, but the basic idea seems sound to me.
You can also quibble about inconsistent enforcement and what not, but as far as I know Twitter is just coming down extremely hard on election disinfo (for understandable reasons), so that’s why they are so on this (and not, say, harassment and hate speech – which to my mind is also a very big problem on Twitter and where I see many failings in Twitter’s insufficient reaction).
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. So often in these discussions people aim for perfection which in this messy reality is an impossibility. But saying “Well, perfection is impossible, so we will just do nothing.” or even “Well, there are complexities here, so we will just do nothing.” is just lazy cowardice. Or ideologically motivated.