Twitter's actions aren't even self-consistent here. If these tweets were all innocuous, then why remove the trend? If they were primarily discussions of other people's activity, rather than explicit calls for violence, then there was no good reason to do this.

Also, there's nothing "moving goal posts" about asking people to at least try to substantiate what they post. The person I responded to didn't even bother posting a link.

You're really cutting out a ton of context here to fit a narrative. Parler was the source of the posts and parler would not moderate it.

"Hang Mike Pence", as has been noted many times, was trending because people were discussing the videos showing Trump rioters chanting that.

People were not banned for using that phrase for the same reason you and I are not going to be banned/flagged for using it here: we aren't calling for violence and murder.

edit: previously called this a bad-faith argument, but that's not fair.

A big problem on social networks (including right here on HN) is that it's very easy for people to behave disingenuously and ask questions to which they already know the answer.It's a very effective wayt o either spread misinformation or steal the time of people who are concerned about misinformation, because it's much cheaper to repeat a BS allegation than it is to debunk it.

Another problem (more peculiar but not unique to HN) is that calling out such behavior is often regarded as uncivil. To my mind disingenuity is far more uncivil; I prefer a rude truth to a polite lie.

Examples of disingenuity include people asking naive-seeming questions to which those same people have already received detailed answers in the past, or repeating factual assertions that they made previously and which were shown and acknowledged to be false. It's not so common on HN but sadly very common on big social media sites or on news commenting platforms like disqus.