They allow doxxing of some people but then have policies against doxxing of other people.

So there is good reason for an alternative if we want DIA-logue rather than echo-chambers.

Conspiracy theories about viruses are literally killing people. I’d file that right in the category of shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Meaning they have contradicted themselves meaning they have countered their own arguments.

Debate is healthy. Suppression is not healthy. It’s getting to be Orwellian and Dystopian. They are allowed to be wrong but not others. They are allowed to re-write history.

China has it where you report fellow citizens for "mistaken beliefs". I fear we're going down the same path and people are doing it happily. It's concerning.

Twitter blocked the NYPost because they didn't approve of their entirely factual journalism.

Twitter can certainly kick whoever they want off their platform for whatever reason. However they don't know anything more about breaking news than the rest of us. They cannot have banned a breaking story because it isn't true, the reason being that they couldn't know.

If they banned a NYPost article based on the newspaper's reputation, that is a ban on a strictly political opinion.

This is the danger with censoring "fake news". Obviously there's a huge grey area, since I don't think many people would object to censoring falsehoods that are agreed upon to be harmful to the public, like claiming that 5G spreads COVID-19.

But with something like the Hunter Biden story, who exactly are these companies like Twitter to almost immediately censor such stories, whether they seem specious or not? Do they hire people specifically for their background in journalistic ethics?

Yes, they are private companies. We are also treating them as arbiters of truth and have handed a massive amount of power to them. They can absolutely censor what they want to censor, but that doesn't mean people are wrong for pointing out the bias and the danger present in exercising such strong armed control over what information people want access to.

By the way, telling people they can't see something only makes them want to see it more. Can we hardly blame people for distrusting Twitter because, for some reason, Twitter had an interest in hiding a story of political interest counted to their own?

If Twitter is only to sanction stories that they believe are true, then they are completely falling flat when it comes to the sheer amount of specious tripe that comes out of the mainstream media. I can't count on both hands the number of times I've read articles making claims based on a study, only to use Sci-hub to look up the actual study and find that it completely contradicts the claim some journalist was making.

The fig leaf they used to justify it was that it exposed an email from a public official (a Ukrainian gas executive) and was "hacked/unauthorized" material. Of course, journalists use unauthorized information all the time (Snowden, Trump's tax returns, etc.) without getting banned from Twitter.

The article was the 100% fact based. The facts laid out in it just happened to not line up with Twitter's preferred election outcome, so they silenced it.

So I would not say "entirely unsubstantiated" -

In fact I would read between the lines and be real - he's certainly seen the articles quoting emails and pics and such - if this was a setup / fake plant - he could of said 'hey that could be my laptop, but I never emailed X and never had a pic of Y - so the thing is false flag - He did say deny the content and owned up to the possibility that it was his hardware - so..

If I'm wrong and don't know the whole context I am open to consider whole truth, admittedly have not watched the whole interview (yet, and don't want to, but will if people say this or that)

At this point it certainly seems that twitter censored something as voting disinfomation or election manipulation - and that by censoring it twitter actually created disinformation / election manipulation.

With this, being such an important thing - I am okay if corrected and find out my current understanding is wrong.

should be more clear.

"He did not say, "I deny the content" - and owned up to the possibility that it was his hardware - so.

and the issues about the story that were brought up, were indeed 'the content' of the emails and such.. which did not get much public discourse.

The laptop story seems like the most probable explanation of this leak, given the documents and FBI correspondence provided. Most attempts I've seen to debunk it seem dishonest or misleading, like "the PDFs' metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019, though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015" as if anyone expected the PDF compilation of incriminating emails to be pre-made by Hunter.

While the email is real and the laptop story seems the most probable explanation, the email doesn't necessarily imply corruption on Joe Biden's part or even that he discussed anything business-related with Pozharskyi.

Regardless of the laptop though, there's clearly a double standard in what Twitter will block with or without proof. The Russian bounty program that was widely reported by the Washington Post and others during the election cycle was unsubstantiated, but no effort was made to block it.

You'd also have to decide whether you include Fox/CNN/MSNBC's opinion segments in the evaluation, or just the news sections. (Fox and MSNBC are especially screwed in this evaluation if you include the opinion hours.) After that, decide if "technically true but highly misleading" counts as factual or not.

The NY Post has a long history of being sensationalist and misleading - there's a reason it's considered a tabloid.

I simply find "the NY Post is a less credible organization than the AP" to be a very sustainable opinion.

They were removed for being a repeat violation of the conduct he'd already been warned to avoid.

The election results questioning thing is a totally different topic but it doesn’t change the fact that people literally attempted to claim Trump wanted an insurrection and Twitter could have continued to flag things with their “election results” blurb rather than pulling the entire post.

I think we all can see what the common denominator is here... why not allow both the condemning of violence and lawlessness as well as the ability to “trust but verify” on election results?

Mitt Romney said “an audit won’t satisfy them only telling them the truth will” only nobody to this day even knows the truth yet, the best we can say is that we aren’t sure, and that leaves it open for either side to say they are sure about their angle.

I was watching the entirety of the events through streamers cameras from start to finish. Were you?

We also know that people have cheated in elections since the dawn of time, in the US it’s typical for each party to just ignore it for the sake of moving along, in this case we found a guy who didn’t care about towing party lines so he decided it was a hill to die on.

Right or wrong if anything he revealed some massive flaws in the system and if voting is as important as people say then it’s probably a good thing to be aware of and scrutinize.

Remember, he could be right, it came down to a mere handful of counties where the results were never able to be verified, and to this day the local officials have been blocking attempts to audit, even after judges ordered it or subpoenas were issued. Maricopa county audit is happening soon I think.

By that logic any tennis match between an excellent player and a terrible one could be said to have been decided by a handful of mistakes and declaring without evidence that those calls were made badly.

The election was fairly lost by a huge margin of the electorate and a substantial EC vote margin. Trump is both a traitor to our country and a liar and you should stop apologizing for him.

Imagine a vote tally machine with a 60% failure rate (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-815/163875/2020...), that means 60% of the time a single human being decided which candidate the ballot went to. Or how about this: https://postimg.cc/wtBWQpXw

All they needed to do was audit the ballots, it wouldn’t have even taken long. The reason lawyers did their best to block these audits was because they knew it was possible for them to lose if the audits went forward.

This is very much not about Donald Trump.

This is pretty pointless because people have already made up their mind that there’s nothing there and nobody would ever lie or manipulate a count to “save the country from Hitler”, when in reality we still don’t know if that happened or not because everyone with the ability to check agreed not to check. I am not claiming to know there was enough fraud to swing it, just that they never confirmed there wasn’t, they just took the word of the local officials that the counts were correct. To me, that’s absolute insanity, and how anyone who is pro-democracy would support that is beyond me.

The Maricopa audit is happening soon, so that should be interesting. And the Fulton ballots were ordered by a Judge to be turned over a few weeks ago, but the local officials are appealing to block the audit!

Alleging fraud is an explicit lack of trust.

In my opinion a complete lack of trust should be the default stance when it comes to voting, we should ideally not have to trust anyone or anything for this.

Except he is NOT right and we DO know. The election was NOT rigged or stolen from him. He lost. Plain and simple.

Private organizations have long had "follow our rules or be asked/told to leave" policies.

It is completely legitimate to challenge election results. It is legal, and a part of our political process. It shouldn't be surprising either - it's hard to trust an election process that made a hasty and unplanned switch to mail-in voting, that altered the rules of the election arbitrarily (example https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/922411176/supreme-court-rules...), etc. And with Democrats repeatedly pushing back on very reasonable voter ID laws, it seems that one side really does not want to make elections secure and instead leave security gaps open, which fuels those concerns further. We should all want a maximally-secure election process because it is the most fundamental piece of our political system.

Keep in mind, I am saying this as someone who believes that the amount of fraudulence alleged would not alter election outcomes. Regardless, it's important for our political process to play out in a trustworthy, transparent, and censorship-free way. Your phrasing of "violation of the conduct" tries to lend legitimacy to Twitter's actions. In reality Twitter simply engaged in one-sided censorship, basically providing election and campaign help to the Democrats because they (their executives, their employees) are politically biased.

There were plenty of calls to violence during last year's summer riots. Twitter didn't censor any of it.

The people who were blocked at all were generally repeat offenders.

A friend was permabanned for saying pit bulls commit a disproportionate number of dog attacks. Linking dog attack statistics didn’t matter.

Screw Twitter and their censorship, and people like you need to stop doing their dirty work for them and pretending everything is ok.

One of these things is not like the others. Equating rape threats with what Twitter unilaterally decided was “election misinformation” and using that as a basis to silence a sitting President of the United States is an extreme case of censorship that justifiably scared anyone with views that divert even slightly from Silicon Valley’s brand of extreme leftism.

Even Jack Dorsey acknowledged that Twitter had entered into dangerous territory with this move [1]. Specifically, he said it ”sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.”

[1] https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690?s=21

There is literally nothing socialist about Silicon Valley. Government spending is not socialism and never has been.

If Silicon Valley supported nationalization, collectivization or unionization, you would have a case. But they don't, in fact they're pretty obviously against all of them.

UBI is not socialist, it has roots in Austrian economics. Most socialists are opposed to it, although some might accept it as a short-term compromise. Like I said, socialism is nationalization, collectivization or unionization. It is not the negative income tax proposed by Hayek which maintains market relations and alienation of labor.

As for universal healthcare/single payer, can you show me people representing Silicon Valley that support Medicare For All? Not just employees, not the proles, but actual power brokers?

Allowing the right to take the country on the crazy train to moral and economic destitution is bad for business and the furthest left are a manageable risk. The smart money is in on supporting moderate right and blue majority.

If so, why? I'd expect the President of the United States to have communications channels not controlled by a private company.

This is false. Twitter also censors search, which operates over the tweets they allowed to be posted.

> Their only appeal was to people who found that kind of speech acceptable. If you market primarily to violent and racist people, you are absolutely going to be associated with negative connotations.

This is not just explicitly false, it is a gish gallop of unsubstantiated insinuations about Parler and/or their customers. I spent some time on Parler, and I was expecting a hellscape but instead literally did not see even one example of the type of content you are listing out here. If it exists, it is exceedingly rare, which makes sense considering Parler had 20 million users. The vast majority of the content was people posting the same content they post on other platforms, to build up a presence on Parler.

As for your claims about what Twitter censors - it is certainly not as limited as you claim. Some examples: 1) They censored Zero Hedge from talking about the Wuhan lab leak theory and banned them for months before reinstating them, under the very dubious claim that they "doxxed" the head of the lab, whose contact information was provided on the Wuhan lab website as the public contact for the lab. More recently, once other people starting talking about the Wuhan lab leak theory, it was suddenly okay. 2) Twitter blocked NY Post's story about Hunter Biden under a vague "hacked materials" policy (https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/twitter-changes-hacked-materia...) - meanwhile, they allowed the NY Times and others to post about Trump's private financial data, and allow "hacktivists" to share illegally obtained materials with no consequence. 3) Twitter censored posts about BLM's founder spending millions on real estate (https://nypost.com/2021/04/16/social-media-again-silences-th...)

There's a more extensive list of inconsistent, one-sided application of censorship in social media at https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/15/11-hacks-leaks-and-hoax... and https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/nb-staff/2020/.... Other articles compiling censorship actions also appear in web searches, and they too go far beyond the types of censorship you mentioned. It is clear that US tech giants - who are more influential than most nations - are not in the business of facilitating open discourse and a diversity of ideas. They are simply ideologically biased in their rampant censorship, which is why alternative platforms, heavier regulation, and a renewal of antitrust law are needed.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/15/twitter-bans-james-okeefe-...