The day Parlor was deplatformed - by all of big tech in an obviously coordinated action - the flimsy pretext was they weren't doing enough to curb hateful speach. Yet on Twitter you had the president of Iran shouting more death to America and China congratulating itself for repressing minorities within its boarders. Yet twitter didn't get booted in the same way. The hypocrisy is beyond blatant.
And that's the real reason for the outrage that Musk might force Twitter to actually move back towards a neutral balance and cease being part of the coordinated propaganda machine - the other services shenanigans are going to stand out even more starkly in contrast. Twitter is big enough and casts enough of a shadow that there is going to be some significant contrast. So much so that those filthy casuals are going to start noticing something different. They might actually start paying attention to everything else going on in tech and the media. Real horror of horrors - they might start asking questions! Uh oh! And if you think all of what I wrote above is conspiracy theory BS - great! Then what does it matter if Musk owns Twitter or not? The gate swings both ways. If everyone else is normal and he starts to bend twitter to his will, that will stick out like a sore thumb in contrast. Nothing to worry about, eh?
Second: let’s say it’s true. How would we know whether it’s because 90% of problem content is generated from participants with one political leaning vs a policy designed to discriminate politically?
I understand your point about being unfair. But wouldn't this solution just lead to people simply leaving the platform because of the increased toxicity?
Which end of the political spectrum do you mean? I've often heard of them being criticized for leaning too far to the liberal-left but the examples you gave are a little confusing.
The Chinese government is authoritarian left-wing so that kind of aligns with the anti-right sentiment but it goes against liberalism.
Parler is conservative/authoritarian right-wing, so that holds up but the Iran example is also conservative/authoritarian right-wing which contradicts that?
The biggest bias I see for the English language with foreign languages being poorly moderated. It is a business after all, so they probably only invest as much in moderation as they need to to keep their advertisers.
This is one of those things that sounds great in theory. But in reality, it likely functions much more like any other adjudication system. People can break rules an infinite number of ways, so there are an infinite number of reasons to ban an account. Understanding many of them will require context that may be problematic to share (for ex: if it happens in DMs). So in practice, the shorthand public reason for bans will pretty much always reduce to "violated site policies."