Kanye West is still on Twitter. What was it he couldn’t say?

He made some anti Semitic comments and I thought his account was banned. Maybe it was just a suspension though.

that never happened. the tweet was only removed

It says that he is locked out of his Twitter account in the article. Isn't that the same thing as being banned?

no, when you are banned, you pretty much cant get your account back. When it is locked, there are steps you can undertake to get access restored (like deleting the offending content).

On one hand, there should ideally be no discrimination. So, hate speech directed even at white males should be disallowed.

On the other hand, society resolved through politics (such as Affirmative Action) that the compound interest and lasting synergistic effects of historical discrimination should be compensated for somewhat. The only way to do that is through more discrimination (i.e. relatively penalizing the least historically discriminated-against people).

I suspect this selective enforcement of the rules is one kind of such relative penalization.

What I don't understand is why do private companies take it upon themselves to do this. Is it genuine stakeholder concern (in conflict with profits)? ESG criteria giving them access to cheaper funding or tax breaks? Plain marketing? Virtue signalling?

>The only way to do that is through more discrimination (i.e. relatively penalizing the least historically discriminated-against people).

Which is done by creating opportunities for historically discriminated groups, not blindly handicapping white people for being white. I'm not white, but it's really worrying to me that that's allowed. Today it's them, tomorrow it's me, then it's you.

I agree with you. Rule of law should be upheld, and laws should be objective.

For instance, taxes for minority X will be Y% smaller for the next Z decades.

This is why I don't like where companies are currently going - arbitrary enforcement.

Why not make the laws or rules clear? Because it affords them some level of plausible deniability to push agendae.

Twitter has corporate users and advertisers. If it became 4chan, that would all evaporate.

It also has professionals. There’s a point at which unmoderated content drives out all but the trolls, spammers, and haters.

I don't have a stance on principled moderation of content. Only on arbitrary enforcement.

People are lazy they think that some sort of compensation will resolve all their issues but it’s not.

Everyone knows that these companies control people because they are constantly engaged on their platforms they can push anything they want. Companies will support any dominating regime for their own good it doesn’t matter if it’s democrats or republicans, fascists or communists, etc.

How are companies benefitting by pushing something, rather than trying to stay politically neutral?

HAve you ever looked at the ads on 4chan/pornhub/generic "free speech" site? That's the reason twitter doesn't allow anti-semetic speech.

Usually there is no deeper reason than the fact that those private companies are staffed at the administrative and policy level by college-educated yuppies living in San Francisco and New York City, and that demographic has become increasingly ideological in the last few years and bought into the idea that progressive toxicity is either a socially good form of tough love/bullying/peer pressure or at least that restricting it disproportionately damages vulnerable groups, etc while what is labeled regressive toxicity is assumed to be heinous, destroying society, and deserving of quick permanent bans.

Companies are not perfectly rational calculators that always know best how to make money. They are made up of people, and people are flawed. People can be deluded into thinking that their bias toward pet issues is profit-neutral or even profit-positive. It happens in the non-politicized corporate sphere all the time - boondoggles is the term.

> I mean you can say “men are trash”, “white people are trash”

Are you sure? It's been a few years since I purged all social media from my life, but three years ago, it was going around and seemingly well-documented with screenshots that saying "men are trash" would get your post auto-deleted and your account sanctioned on Facebook.

This seems like another of those things where extremists on all sides believe they're being uniquely persecuted and some other side of the spectrum is given free reign, when more likely than not most mainstream platforms are pretty centrist.

It's common. Here's a fresh example from a blue check.

https://twitter.com/TalbertSwan/status/1581103527585120257

I believe that's because Facebook gave itself some actual rules and then enforced them, regardless of who said it and who was the subject of the post, they treated all groups the same. Twitter or Reddit do not.

> Maybe we should not allow toxic behavior at all

Moderation[0] is not censorship. It just means having a productive conversation and debate without name-calling, slurs, and other malfeasance. "Trash" is not a harmful word, but inciting violence against an ethnic group definitely is harmful. There's also historical baggage attached to ethnic groups such as the Jews who were persecuted in an actual war and genocide. "Men" is too generic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderation

When will we do something about the toxicity against the historically marginalized group, "White Men"?