Whereas others who just go ahead and say it will eventually get their accounts suspended.
It's the dogwhistle versus the foghorn.
> there are so many differences between a religion and a gender decision/behavior/whatever you'd like to call it that they're really hard to compare in this way.
Since you seem to have forgotten or are having difficulty reading the thread.
You: They're both round-ish you absolute moron.
Seems you have a bone to pick with aspirins and/or elephants. Have a good weekend!
I would say that there are a couple ways in which religion and gender decision/identity are quite comparable in specific contexts like this; namely, they both involve people adopting assertions or beliefs that are empirically untrue (and I say this as someone who does believe in God and is somewhat religious), and asking for varying degrees of deference to such beliefs.
In the free speech context, we have the issue of when something is criticism of these subjective beliefs, versus when it is hate speech. I believe I can furnish at least one other, more clear example of a context in which, to me at least, they are pretty comparable.
I think your point about "who is saying it" is like...I agree with your example, but I don't see that can be a rule lol. That's just discriminating on the basis of who is saying it--and besides, how do you necessarily know whether someone is armed and lonely?
Does JK Rowling get a pass? She wasn't banned on Twitter, but she gets routinely dragged by a lot of people nowadays. IDK what most people think of Sam Harris. I am just glad he isn't more well-known and popular.
I also agree that it is a complex problem lol.
That said, I don't think there's much banning going on of people who are truly just stating their position "x is not y." In fact if that were the case, you'd see e.g. JK Rowling booted immediately. So why isn't she? In my view, platforms and individuals are making assessments of other people's intents and the likely impacts of their words in totality.
It's a deeply inconvenient fact that the words "a b c" uttered by one person to one audience can yield completely different results than the exact same words "a b c" uttered by a different person to a different audience. This is inconvenient because it makes consistent-appearing regulation basically impossible, but the reality is that everyone does this every day. We get it wrong a lot, but on net, it's obvious that a neo-Nazi with disgruntled, armed, lonely young men followers saying, "the Jews are overrepresented in media" is completely different from Pew Research saying "the Jews are overrepresented in media." These two phrases are different in basically every single way that matters!
So this is why IMO JK Rowling and Sam Harris kind of get passes. It's very obvious they're not calling people to arms. It's obvious their fans are not about to go raid a mosque or a gender-affirming care clinic. This is not so obvious for, as far as I can tell, many of the people who've gotten hit by Twitter's moderation.
Edit: And just to be crystal clear, I don't think Twitter or anyone else has gotten this exactly right. Idk what that'd even look like. It's a ridiculously hard problem. But that's why I never bought a website with 160MM DAU declaring that free speech is back.