Should the US president get some special protection because of his job? Surely the same standards should be applied to all users?

The US president has just won the largest popularity contest in the world, and by nature of the role has a mandate to bring ideas into the political discourse for a couple of years. It isn't so much that there should be special protection. If Twitter's policy bans the president it is way out of line with actual as-measured community expectations.

Let's not get hyperbolic; it's the largest political popularity contest in the US. In India, 600 Million people voted in the 2019 Indian General Election. Eurovision is also bigger than the US General Election, at least by viewership (I couldn't find televoting numbers).

Sorry India. 2nd largest.

The POTUS should be treated as just a person to Twitter. However, that person has the resources of the world’s most powerful government. POTUS doesn’t need Twitter to get a message out.

But look at it from the other direction. What about all the people who follow him, fans and haters alike, who now have to go elsewhere to see what their sitting president has to say. It's unfair to them to do things like that. And honestly it's pretty childish. Just like the struggle session they put you through if they've taken action against your account. They literally make you delete your own tweet. Which doesn't sound like much, but they had to build that functionality when they fully have the power to do it themselves. It's intentionally spiteful.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/struggle_session

He had access to use the actual POTUS twitter account. Wasn’t his personal account banned?

That sounds like the opposite of liberal ideals, where the system treats everybody the same.

Liberal ideals have no hold on Twitter. The liberal ideal is to let as many people as possible have a Twitter account.

Did you read their announcement when they banned him[0]? Banning the man representing, at minimum, a quarter of a country with such nakedly partisan logic is an embarrassment to anyone who wants to pretend Twitter cares about liberal political ideals. They were listening to voices in their head rather than reading what Trump wrote; voices which obviously won't tolerate anything outside a narrow, illiberal view.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

Cool. What I'm saying is that you cannot pay lip service to liberal ideals while also suggesting that simply having a very large number of people vote for you is evidence that you shouldn't be removed from a service for policy violations.

The system has to be compatible with liberal ideals before its correct operation causes liberal outcomes.

A system that, based on their flimsy justifications, simply bans political opponents isn't liberal. The classic position a liberalist should take is that the service policy needs to be reformed to embody better values around free political speech.

Not that I'm too invested in the situation. Twitter will be on the way out soon enough if it doesn't pull its head in and tolerate serious dissent from the favoured narrative.

Trump was allowed to run rampant bringing "ideas into the political discourse" for his entire term. Also, it was his personal account that was banned. The official presidential account is still there.

And as the president, he had the entire American media apparatus at his disposal. The premise that somehow an American president can't effectively communicate policy without a Twitter account is absurd. Previous presidents have been able to manage just fine.

Implying that morality is just whatever is popular? Do you think Middle Eastern Twitter should allow people to talk about how they're going to exterminate the Jewish and gay people? And Russian Twitter should allow calling out locations of humanitarian corridors so the military and mine them? And Chinese Twitter should ban all discussion of faults of the CCP? Because those things are often community expectations.

The US is very, very divided. Trump won with basically 50% support, he lost re-election, and then lost even further support when he started making up lies about election fraud. Even if morality was derived from popularity (or just profitability, if that's what you think Twitter did it for), Trump no longer had close to a majority. Maybe his comments were in line with expectations of 60% of Republicans, but the other 70% of the country thought that was what was unacceptable.

Meeting the expectations of a community is a business decision.

> Surely the same standards should be applied to all users?

The standard under discussion seems to be free speech absolutism with the question "how much more liberal could twitter get". The ban of Trump just makes a good high profile example of Twitters current limitations on free speech.

They banned the personal account of the president not the official account. The official account was tweeting until after the election. I would have loved to see if they would have banned the potus account if he tweeted from there but we'll never know.

He got banned as a citizen of the united states, welcome to people's sovereignity where the politicians have the same fundamental rights as the citizens they represent.

The governmental account is still active.

What is the relation between a user of a service and what they do off that service ?