Why should Twitter give up their right to freedom of expression and freedom of association?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights

Not sure they have to. Gjsman affirmed their right to freedom (they CAN), but would prefer that they exercised that freedom in a certain way (they SHOULD).

Believe it or not, government regulations don't have to be the solution to every little thing.

See saurik's comment below for more.

I just want to be clear that it's incorrect to use the word "censor" or "censorship" to refer to the act of terminating someone's Twitter account for breach of contract.

Furthermore, because Twitter isn't the government, it's probably incorrect to use "censor" or "censorship" at all. "Discrimination" is the correct word to use if a corporation like Twitter terminated her account for an illegal reason. For example: if Twitter terminated her account because she was a woman or a person of color or a member of a protected class.

>: to examine in order to suppress (see SUPPRESS sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censor

That doesn't apply? The common definition of censor is not exclusive to government.

Even if we use the definition in sense 2 (and I definitely don't think we should) enforcing a contract is not censorship. As far as I am aware, Marjorie Taylor Green was over the age of majority and of sound mind and body - and therefore fully capable of agreeing to the terms of a written agreement - when she agreed to the Twitter terms of service.

> I just want to be clear that it's incorrect to use the word "censor" or "censorship" to refer to the act of terminating someone's Twitter account for breach of contract.

You're right, the censorship happened even before that: Twitter's contract that says "you're not allowed to express any of these opinions" is the root of the censorship.

Where does Twitter's user agreement say "you're not allowed to express any of these opinions"? Otherwise, your argument feels like hyperbole to me.

If the agreement doesn't say that, then why are you calling her tweets breach of contract?

You are painfully wrong on the definition of censorship. Censorship is the act of a third party intermediary controlling the content of speech, no matter who that third party is. For example, Merriam-Webster defines "censor" as "a person who supervises conduct and morals". They go on to use the word "official, which you might think implies bona fide government. But they define "official" as "one who holds or is invested with an office", which most certainly applies to private corporations.

By banning people based on the content of their speech, Twitter is precisely engaging in censorship. Just because they haven't called their department head responsible for handing out bans a "Censor" does not mean their constructive behavior is something new that we don't have a word for!

Furthermore, immediately referencing the Bill of Rights to call Twitter's activities "freedom of expression" is wantonly destructive to any sort of discussion. The US Bill of Rights takes natural rights and narrowly frames them in terms of restrictions on government, because that is likely the best that can be done at its level of abstraction. The scale Twitter operates at is much closer to that of government than that of the People - it is most certainly appropriate to say that Twitter is impinging upon individuals' freedom of speech. If you do not agree that it is a concern, then go ahead and make that argument on its own merits. Narrowly construing definitions so that you can discard concerns does not make for productive understanding.

(Having said that my own feeling here is that Ms. Ignorance-as-a-Service has reaped what she has sown, is of a notoriety that is legible to Twitter, and can easily publish on other platforms - compare with all the unnoteworthy individuals who get the automated banhammers with no appeal. And this will ultimately just be a boon to her, just like any other celebrity feud. But let us not twist our own definitions to assuage our cognitive dissonance!)

> Furthermore, immediately referencing the Bill of Rights to call Twitter's activities "freedom of expression" is wantonly destructive to any sort of discussion.

It's absolutely appropriate to reference the Bill of Rights. As a collection of individuals, Twitter is legally entitled to both freedom of expression and freedom of association. That said, Twitter also has every right to ban Marjorie Taylor Green for breach of contract.

> The scale Twitter operates at is much closer to that of government than that of the People.

I'm sorry, but this argument is objectively false. You cannot compare the power of Twitter to the nearly unfathomable power of the three branches of the US government. Twitter can't levy taxes. Twitter can't declare war. Twitter can't prosecute you and/or put you in jail. Twitter simply doesn't have these powers.

Taking your definitions and continuing on with them, there is nothing that distinguishes "US Government" from a private company with whom you're contracting with, whereby it can do all of those internal-facing "exceptional" things you listed. Roughly - your parents were under contract with the company when you were a minor, you assented to the contract when you became of age, and you can terminate the contract at any time by leaving their premises and paying the cancellation fee.

Furthermore by your simplistic definition, the US Government is also just "a collection of individuals". And while that collection has (conceptually) agreed to be bound by the Bill of Rights, there are clearly greater concepts at play than what has been legally defined - the US Bill of Rights does not have a monopoly on the definition of natural rights!

But talking in this framework is ultimately unproductive - it hinders making judgements on the actual details of the relationships, "contractual" or otherwise. And so discussions of individual freedom must necessarily focus on overall qualitative behavior and not simply condoning anything conforming to some axiomatic framework.

Twitter has the right to freedom of expression and freedom of association, and this gives them the perfect right to ban people from their platform if they don't agree with what people say. Just like you have the right to ask people to leave your house or business if you don't agree with what they say. Twitter's rights, and your rights, include banning people from platform/home whose political speech they/you don't agree with - which Twitter didn't even do in this case.

In this case, Marjorie Taylor Green's Twitter account was terminated for breach of contract. She was an adult when she signed a written contract with Twitter and opened her account. According to Twitter, she breached the agreement and they elected to choose a remedy that some people don't like. That's just too bad. She isn't facing arrest or imprisonment as a result of her statements. She can go ahead and sue them in civil court if she disagrees!

< whereby it can do all of those internal-facing "exceptional" things you listed

I'm sorry, I hate to repeat myself, but a corporation cannot levy taxes, cannot jail people, cannot execute someone, cannot declare war, all of which a government can do through a variety of legal means. In fact, the US government has so much power that it can do these things through extra legal means and face no consequences whatsoever.

Twitter does not have this kind of power, and I am rightly suspicious of arguments that attempt to frame the situation otherwise, no matter how elegantly or abstractly presented.

> Twitter has the right to freedom of expression and freedom of association, and this gives them the perfect right to ban people from their platform if they don't agree with what people say

This is the legal analysis of how Twitter can do this, which I understand. But you keep asserting it as if it is some universal truth, without engaging with my actual arguments about the constructive result of such framework.

> a corporation cannot levy taxes, cannot jail people

Except that it can - you can sign a contract agreeing to some schedule of charges (called "taxes") or to have to spend time in a certain place (called "jail").

> cannot execute someone

The only reason you cannot sign a contract that allows for your execution as a consequence of default is because your bare ability to contract has been restricted by the larger government.

> Why should Twitter give up their right to freedom of expression and freedom of association?

The argument "I know they can but that does not mean they should" doesn't imply that when they don't do something they shouldn't do they lose the ability to do it... I shouldn't be a jerk, but I do believe I have the legal right to be a jerk, so I guess by your argument I need to be a jerk and I guess no one should even call me out for it? That doesn't make any sense: Twitter currently can do this stuff; and yet, despite that, they shouldn't.

When the decentralized web, for all intents and purposes died and was replaced by like 5-6 major platforms who largely collude to silence people or perspectives...all the "mah property" take on how this isn't a free speech case goes out the door.

The monopolistic cabal of Twitter, Facebook and Google changes how this should be seen.

Imho - you either break them up into a 100 companies, or you legally ban them from censorship.

Simple: Because they're kind of regarded (through the law, by the courts) as a "public space".

Twitter should not censor anybody off their platform when the courts consider them a public forum, let alone elected officials.

In an ideal world, because they are now the public square effectively, they should be held to a different stricter standard. As well as other big tech companies (App Store, etc.)

Twitter is not the public square. They app stores are not the public square. No one takes that argument seriously because it's not serious. Is it censorship that most existing book publishers are highly unlikely to publish a book of your or my political opinions? Should a publisher, or anyone else, be compelled to promote speech they disagree with? Would you want someone to compel you to write or publish lies?

Marjorie Taylor Greene has VASTLY more ability to get her messages out, and to therefore express herself, than the average American citizen. She can go on Fox News or MSNBC or she can have her office send out press releases. Please stop saying this is censorship. This is NO WAY meets any accepted definition of censorship in the frame you are using.

I’m not talking about just Twitter or just this issue. And I specified “in an ideal world” which we aren’t in.

In an ideal world, big tech would have more regulation and would have, due to their size, certain regulations on their behavior and who they choose not to do business with, not just in the political sphere.

An example (to draw an extreme example to make my point), Visa and MasterCard (due to their size) couldn’t just say screw OnlyFans. They are too large and influential especially together.

I don't understand why regulating big tech is ideal. Isn't it more ideal for the government to run their own social media, or to have Twitter/Facebook deals that provide a white label version of those services exclusively for government use? I feel like either of those approaches would accomplish a similar goal with fewer compromises than regulation would entail.

Twitter is not a conscious being, and cannot experience the subjective feeling of being oppressed. I support maximal liberty for humans, and appropriate protection of those humans from corporations as well as the government. Corporations may be collections of people, but they're a lot more than that - which makes them not human - and in any case they are not loci of experience.

"The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals, therefore have free speech rights under the First Amendment. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Some users might like a platform where saying obviously false things and potentially dangerous things is not allowed and I don't know why Twitter should not be allowed to provide them with this.

They have a fair amount of work to do to achieve that goal.

By this logic, your family is also not a conscious being and cannot experience the subjective feeling of being oppressed. Or maybe you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend and a group of friends. Are these groups also unable to experience the subjective feeling of being oppressed?

That's right. But they are able to have what we call a shared experience, which is a little different. However it isn't relevant here, because the shared experience of all the employees of a corporation is not the basis for the legal personhood of corporations. And what is the basis?

class Corporation : public Person

It's for the same reason mediocre OOP programmers use inheritance to borrow some partial implementation. It gets the job done, even if it doesn't quite fit.

Most private sector businesses don't want to be in the business of helping spread deadly lies, though. And they're not required to be.

Twitter did not even say she lied, they just said that they (Twitter) considered it “misleading.” Not false, “misleading.”

That’s a distinction without a difference. The reason that false claims are dangerous is because they can mislead people.

Most deception is build on half truth and partial truths and or even selective truths. Outright lies tend to be less believable

They don't want the liability of calling here a liar. But she's big on posting about 'vaccine deaths' and that the vaccine doesn't work against Delta and that people 65 and under don't need to worry about Covid.

So you're saying no elected official should be bound by any laws, contracts or the terms of service of any organization, since doing so could be interpreted as "censorship?"

That if anyone else had said what Marjorie Taylor Greene had said, they would be subject to action by Twitter under its own stated policies, but the rules just shouldn't apply to her?

> they would be subject to action by Twitter under its own stated policies

When people say "hang the rich" on Twitter do you see them getting banned? Twitter specifically says they do not accept appeal to violence, but in reality they only censor the language they don't agree with.

Yes. Lots of people. They don't have press offices like congresspeople do to complain about it though. Things like "in Minecraft" or "Minecraft parody" are popping up as loopholes that seem to work. All Twitter cares about is plausible deniability if someone strings up Warren Buffet after tweeting about doing it.

>When people say "hang the rich" on Twitter do you see them getting banned?

If you believe these people constitute a direct threat to the safety of the rich, why don't you report them?

Has Twitter applied their rules fairly and evenly, or even tried to do so?

Last I remember Maxine Waters was calling for public harassment without consequence.

Twitter isn't the government. Twitter isn't the government. Twitter isn't the government.

Like it or not, they have a perfect right to terminate her account for any legal reason, including breach of contract. For the record, Twitter doesn't even need a "reason" as long as they don't terminate her for an illegal reason.

This might be difficult to understand, but it's not censorship.

Just because Twitter has the right to do something doesn't make it right for them to do it. And that they have the right to do it also doesn't mean that people shouldn't be angry at them for having done it, or use their right to call them out for it. Twitter shouldn't be doing this stuff. You totally can defend their right to do it while damning their actually doing it... but that isn't what you are doing as the person you are arguing with didn't even claim they shouldn't be allowed to do it: they merely said they shouldn't do it.

You mean the "right" to ban Marjorie Taylor Green for breach of contract? Marjorie Taylor Green breached a written agreement she entered into with Twitter. Provided their terms of service aren't illegal, Twitter certainly should be able to enforce them.

They suspended her personal account but her official congressional account is still live

Why not? Why should a private business let government decide who can speak and how and their platform? China does that and it's not funny.

Her official congressional account was not suspended, only her personal account.

No they definitely should, this is precisely their job. Why should public officials not be held to the same standards as individual citizens

Because they have the weight of people who elected them behind them. I don't understand how that's hard to understand.

It's the same reason why we care about murder of an elected official more than a murder of any other person.

She'll be fine. Isn't the media market, in the US, free?

She'll go to fox news or parler.

So you think they should be held to higher standards than others then?

I think it should be the voters who decide what the standars are, not random corporations.

Voters decide who sits in congress, not who gets to talk on twitter, thats a job for twitters employees

It was only her personal account that was suspended. The account tied to her position in government is still there @RepMTG.

Is it censorship? she’s not banned from the internet… less than 25% of the country has a twitter account.

Also Twitter has now demonstrated they are completely ignorant to the Streisand Effect.

This won’t change minds. This will only harden viewpoints and invite political and regulatory scrutiny.

> Streisand Effect

She is a Congressional Representative.

This isn't about shutting her up. Its about Twitter coming out and saying that they agree that she's a loon. No one actually expects a member of Congress to be permanently shut up over something like this.

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When '@dang' comes around here and deletes posts, its about pushing the discussion in the direction they want for this website.

The _ONLY_ moderating action internet citizens have is moderation: deletion of posts, soft-banning, permanent bans, and the like. There's no other possible effect available for Twitter (or other social media) to come down on unruly users.

I disagree. Any communication system can be gamed, but the incentives can be distributed many different ways. If Twitter had shared blocklists for example, it would be easier for people to coordinate that kind of signaling. I think the originally intent was to have it as a platform for positive conversation (so you can favorite or share a tweet but not downvote it); however the structure of the platform meant that disagreement instead became expressed through snark, sarcasm, and pithy one-liners, to the detriment of any real discourse.

> If Twitter had shared blocklists for example, it would be easier for people to coordinate that kind of signaling.

But Twitter doesn't. Hacker News doesn't. Reddit doesn't.

All three of these large Social Media sites require moderators to police the actions of their users. This isn't new or exotic, this is just how the web typically works. Forums, Usenet, Mailing lists, IRC, BBS, its always been like this.

If you want to try to make a new social network with different moderation systems (ex: user-based blocking), feel free to do so. But I've hung out enough on 8-chan to know that you'll have to deal with Swatters and Doxxers almost immediately, who are looking for an unmoderated coordination medium, and they'll take advantage of your features. You'll also have to deal with lesser forms of spam and advertisements: Cryptocoin spam these days, but it used to be Viagra, or Nigerian Prince scams.

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The question isn't "Twitter shouldn't be allowed to moderate its users". The question is if Twitter made the right move here or not.

So now lets actually discuss the crux of the issue: is spreading COVID19 misinformation a big enough reason to warrant a banning? I of course agree with the move. Our hospitals are filling up with the Omicron variant and the vast majority of these patients are not-vaccinated. Twitter leveraging their reputation to say that Marjorie Taylor Green is a net benefit to society.

Well nothing is preventing them from implementing such features if they want to.

> Well nothing is preventing them from implementing such features if they want to.

There's nothing preventing you from implementing your own social network with those rules.

Hacker News is a forum for business ideas and web-based technologies after all, built around an angel fund / venture capital slant.

But I'm trying to tell you that you'll end up relying upon user-based moderation for many cases: including simple cases like spam from new users or VPNs. Maybe even IP-based blocking as certain unsavory groups of people tend to cluster around certain IP addresses.

I am not sure what you think you're arguing with.

I responded to your statement that 'The _ONLY_ moderating action internet citizens have is moderation [...]'; I'm just pointing out that while that is true for twitter users at present, Twitter could experiment with other approaches if they felt like it. I'm not saying they must or they should, just that nothing prevents them. I responded in handwavey terms because your comment about 'internet citizens' seemed pretty open-ended.

But I'm trying to tell you that you'll end up relying upon user-based moderation for many cases

OK? That's the idea I was exploring. It worked to some extent on NNTP, where people would maintain 'killfiles' and different Usenet groups were more or less protective of their cohesion. I'm not suggesting it as some sort of magic bullet, just saying that centralized moderation is not the only possible approach.

> It worked to some extent on NNTP

And arguably not, because a huge number of NNTP servers were in fact, moderated. Especially as spam and warez started to appear on servers owned by public institutions (universities and the like), a huge chunk of USENET split into the alt.* unmoderated groups, and the other, centrally moderated groups.

alt.* would be the 'some extent' to which it worked. I don't have time for any more of this relentless contrarianism, enjoy your day. Or don't.

You are basically arguing for some line that needs to be drawn for when services are allowed to ban someone, and then to lift that line to a new level because someone is an elected politician. Twitter - rightly - holds everybody in principle to the same standards. Want to play in the sandbox? Play nice.

I’m not sure Streisand effect applies here. Anyone roughly aware of American politics knows MTG’s looniness. And Twitter has already banned DJT which was a bigger thing. This isn’t going to bring attention where there wasn’t any already.

Twitter doesn't need to care about the Streisand effect. The goal was to remove her from being their problem. Mission accomplished

Let her go elsewhere

Absurd. Of all platforms, Twitter is best positioned to assess how big the Streisand effect really is and measure whether the howls of outrage from her supporters are really louder than the low-level rumble of discontent from her opponents.

Streisand effect only helps them in this case. They don't care about the content of the message or changing minds. They care about the message being tied to twitter and the damage to their brand.

I don't think history has proved the Streisand Effect materializes here. When Twitter and others deplatformed Trump after January 6, his direct lines to his followers were dissolved. He had a subscription email or something that was a failure. I think he's trying to launch a social network soon. He has never managed to get as big of microphone as he had before.

What laws should be written to address this then?

Twitter has worldwide reach, so what if a citizen of another country is harmed due to misinformation posted by a US elected official? The citizens of that country didn't elect them.

She’s only elected to be a legislator in the House of Representatives. It’s not like she has a license to kill. That ought to have nothing to do with anything else, including her privileges on any random website.

That's the problem of the other country to defend its citizens.

What obligation does Twitter have to provide anyone with a platform?