That's funny, I didn't hear any of this righteous self indignation during the last administration over its bogus antitrust threats. Were those okay with you or did it take you this long to work up a really good lather?

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/05/trump-looking-into-antitrust...

This is presumptive whataboutism with fairly incendiary language. You don't know my views on this question and have lumped me in with am amorphous blob you've labelled "conservative". You might be surprised to learn that I am not against social media censoring hate speech, for example.

For the record, what Trump was doing was clearly authoritarian and had the intention of controlling moderation decisions on these platforms. It was anti-democratic and awful due to its underlying intentions. Ron DeSantis is trying a similar thing to Ben and Jerry's now.

However, I was and remain less concerned by this than I am with the influence of the Democratic Party on tech firms, mainly because the Republicans have so little influence despite the threats. You can see the power asymmetry (and revolving door) on display through a single example, the censorship of the Hunter Biden story on the eve of the election.

They didn't censor it, for nothing really significant has come of it since other than he was exploiting existing law for his own personal gain. So they decided to mostly ignore Giuliani's fantastical tales of the stolen laptop. Seems like a good call to me. Imagine a congress willing to work together to change the laws to make what he did illegal in the future though. That's how things used to mostly work IMO.

We seem to be in a quarterly pandemic wave cycle right now and it's overwhelming our healthcare system and it's killing Americans and ultimately depressing the economy. Given all the changes and adaptations we made as a society post 9/11, attempting to control the flow of covid disinfo seems minimal to me. And it's easy to criticize our leaders. But just like a true first amendment zealot should build their own social media site centered around the first amendment to find out why that's impractical, try leading this country when it's on a course to be an indefinite pandemic purgatory.

But you raise a valid point. I'm very concerned with YouTube's slut shaming through demonetization of Naomi Wu's YouTube channel. It's not a good look for them but then very little is these days.

They did censor the original New York Post story. The media chose to ignore it, but the social media companies were censoring any links to the story, actively encouraged by Democratic Party operatives such as Schiff who were falsely labelling it as Russian disinformation and encouraging a blackout. This has potentially election moving consequences, so coercive Democratic influence over social media is absolutely a real threat to democracy.

Regarding your comment about a 1A-friendly platform, I don't advocate for a censorship-less social media platform. It's stupid on its face. But moderation should either be voluntary with no coercive influence of government (whether that influence is achieved by carrot or stick), or it should be defined by the legislative body (hate speech laws) instead of implied threat of regulation or via the executive branch.

Regarding the flagging of COVID misinformation, that's fairly lower on my list of worries, and it's not that I don't favor removing that toxic information, it's that the executive branch is the one coordinating it. The encouragement of political censorship (the Hunter Biden case above) is much higher on my list of concerns and much more directly anti-democratic.

And then they reversed their censorship. It's hard to make perfect decisions in real time. The information got out there, it was bogus, and they faced criticism for doing it in the first place.

So they chose to eliminate its effect on the election based (I would assume) on the bogus stuff about Hillary's email server four years earlier. And if this is the end of October surprises I can only say good riddance, but it probably won't be.

Try walking a mile in their shoes before holding them accountable to infallible behavior is my only suggestion here.

We're going to have to disagree about a first amendment friendly platform. I'm a huge fan of letting the marketplace of ideas work these things out lawsuits and all. I 100% expect a dumpster fire every single time, but then most tech companies end up dumpster fires anyway so why not? There's probably some epsilon incremental revenue pulling this off and capturing the single digit percentage audience that demands these things, no?

If Twitter's moderation team made that decision because they genuinely thought it was Russia disinfo, then I have no problem with it. But the waters are so muddied when we have a chorus of policymakers applying pressure and encouraging that decision, both through the rhetoric in that moment and leading up to it. It's that kind of behavior/rhetoric (similar to Trump's anti-trust threats) which is the threat to democracy, not the decision itself in the abstract which may have been perfectly defensible.

I can only conclude that Schiff et al were being intentionally dishonest about the Russian disinfo line in an attempt to apply the maximum amount of influence at the most critical time before the election. It was a cynical attempt by elected officials to sway an election through censorship. They knew it wasn't Russian disinfo at the time. Joe Biden's own comments revealed that knowledge about a day into the saga.