Grow a backbone, or fold to public pressure?
Hell, people used to criticize these walled gardens. when did the argument change to the gardener shouldn't have control of the garden instead of free thinking people shouldn't let themselves be trapped behind a wall?
Who determines what is hateful?
Also, just look in the replies of any regular person who attacks QAnon claims on Twitter and you will see responses accusing them of being a pedophile, a murderer, a Satanist, and claiming that they, their families, etc. will be imprisoned or executed.
The posts are word salad fever dreams claiming certain celebs are literally satanic and practicing witchcraft and ritually murdering children.
A depressing number of people swallow it. We haven't evolved enough since Salem.
The nature of "Q", or at least the current person publishing under that guise (likely Jim and/or Ron Watkins), is that they rarely make any kind of concrete claims or predictions, but they've certainly made allusions to Moloch, Satan, cannibalism, etc. when referring to political figures. It's the responsibility of "bakers" in the community to take "Q"'s "crumbs" and come to conclusions. Certainly these conclusions have been widespread in the community for years and have not been spoken against by "Q".
In this case, Twitter.
People keep forgetting that 1984 assumes a singular authoritarian control, not multiple authorities and the freedom to choose one, several, or none of them.
I’m trying to figure out how do you know the basis on which some private enterprise decided to refuse to provide their service to someone. Is it based on their stated reason?
If you’re trying to understand the basis by which courts figure this stuff out, what we’re talking about here is the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is civil law, and the evidentiary standard that applies is “preponderance of evidence”.
The businesses’ stated reason is certainly one piece of evidence that courts weigh, but it’s far from the only one. If you refuse me business based on what I’m wearing, but I can show you regular do business with people wearing the same thing, or I can demonstrate a preponderance of evidence that you knew I was homosexual and had made statements to the effect that you would refuse to serve homosexuals, courts aren’t going to just take you at your word.
That would be analogous to the clothes example, right?
If I understood your point correctly, a company could get in trouble for refusing to service someone based on some stated reason (e.g. your clothes) if it can be shown that they do serve other people that match that given reason.
It seems to me that the situation with Twitter is the same, if it can be shown that they justify banning some people based on hate speech, while refusing to ban other people performing the same kind of speech.
Merely being arbitrary in enforcement or inconsistent isn’t enough to automatically trigger government protection.
If you say that this isn’t fair, then I agree. However the class protections are pragmatic and serve to reduce social disruption. Like it or not, people are a lot less worked up over being discriminated against due to being democrats, than they are for being Catholics.
Ah, no, I didn’t quite spell that out.
They can get in trouble if their stated reason for refusing service doesn’t line up with the way they treat other people who behave the same way, IF that disparity in behaviour can help build an argument that the preponderance of evidence suggests that their real reason for refusing service was related to your membership in a protected class. They’re free to behave inconsistently in general.[1]
So if Twitter says they banned 17k QAnon accounts for coordinated misinformation campaigns but for whatever reason you could show that a bunch of other misinfo networks they knew about weren’t banned, and all the QAnon accounts were also known to twitter to be Unitarians, and this was part of a pattern of behaviour towards Unitarian accounts, that might be legally actionable.
But if there’s no underlying, unifying element to these 17k accounts that’s protected, Twitter is free to ban them from their service even if they’re not very consistent about enforcing their TOS.
[1] Which isn’t to say that behaving inconsistently is smart, precisely because it can open you up to these kinds of arguments if your inconsistency starts to look like a pattern of behaviour towards a protected class.
[...] you can refuse to serve someone even if they’re in a protected group, but the refusal can’t be arbitrary and you can’t apply it to just one group of people.
To avoid being arbitrary, there must be a reason for refusing service and you must be consistent.
[...] you must apply your policy to everyone. For example, you can’t turn away a black person who’s not wearing a tie and then let in a tieless white man. You also can’t have a policy that sounds like it applies to everyone but really just excludes one particular group of people. So, for example, a policy against wearing headscarves in a restaurant would probably be discriminatory against Muslims.
[1] https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/the-right-to-refuse-servi...
Edit: formatting
So the missing piece of the puzzle is: which of the protected groups would every member of QAnon fall under? There's no law against discriminating against people who believe the QAnon conspiracy and spread it.
IANAL but I don't think so. In the US at least, they can't be inconsistent in a way that correlates to persecuting a protected class (refusing service based on race for instance) but otherwise they have the right - often explicitly displayed on signage to patrons on entry - to be able to refuse service to anyone for any reason.
It's a massive group of people LARPing about the most serious crimes anyone can be accused of and it focuses on new people nearly every day. No trials. Weak evidence. No way for the accused to face their accuser. It's as bad as the worst of "cancel culture".
It's also been interesting that the proponents of allowing these campaigns to continue say that stopping them will indeed lead to totalitarian censorship of "free speech."
Granted we must always be vigilant against social pressure going too far. For example, the mob that formed to find the Boston marathon bomber over-zealously targeted the wrong people, risking their lives. We must learn from things like this.
But to jump from banning hate campaigns on private platforms, to total censorship, is an impressively intellectually dishonest juggling act.