Have you considered that many people here actually work in companies and know how they work, meaning they don't need a media source to know that the Twitter files are bogus? In fact, most people here have brains and can think for themselves, and we actually don't rely on a media outlet for all our takes.

Have you also considered that there is a huge difference between Khamenei and PMs saber rattling online against other countries (which was actually consistent with Twitter's then current policy of treating world leaders, Trump included, with a lenient hand) vs. a president not condemning and (very likely encouraging) an attempt by his own supporters seeking to overturn an election as said attempt was going on?

> a president not condemning and (very likely encouraging)

So not condemning something (that is to say, choosing not to speak) and "very likely encouraging" (as opposed to actually encouraging) is somehow worse than calling for outright genocide?

Your comment isn't really clear here. Are denying that the two comments I posted aren't contributing to violence that was actively going on at the time of their posting?

And with regard to this:

> Have you considered that many people here actually work in companies and know how they work, meaning they don't need a media source to know that the Twitter files are bogus? In fact, most people here have brains and can think for themselves, and we actually don't rely on a media outlet for all our takes.

thanks for the copypasta :)

The larger problem isn't the lack of uniform enforcement. Our actual problem was trusting Twitter to remain impartial in the first place. It's crazy how many people bought into the "global town hall" bullshit Elon Musk pedaled, and now it's unsurprising to watch him backpedal now that the reigns are in his hands.

Hopefully people realize that trusting $COMPANY will never deliver you anything good. We either regulate the things we care about, or let stuff like this happen. Either way, the world keeps spinning.

This is why we need regulation surrounding these things.

It's a balancing act between individual and social rights (individual in this case being twitter), but these companies very explicitly build to scale to be a sort of "town hall" and in doing so start having very large social influence the likes of which no one in history has ever had.

When they get to this scale there has to be extra responsibility here for the good of society as a whole.

> but these companies very explicitly build to scale to be a sort of "town hall" and in doing so start having very large social influence the likes of which no one in history has ever had.

I think a bazaar or carnival is a better metaphor, since a town hall is a brick and mortar thing that lasts into posterity, whereas a social network is more temporary

> When they get to this scale there has to be extra responsibility here for the good of society as a whole.

Or people could just not use the service and move onto a different one? There's nothing permanent about the current social networks that are popular right now

> Or people could just not use the service and move onto a different one?

And people can just move to a different town, that doesn't stop us from having laws in place to guarantee rights in the current town.

You don't live in a town, though. You live in a privately owned-and-operated digital Olive Garden, which Elon Musk bought and made Confederate Flags mandatory or whatever. The town already decided that's okay a few hundred years ago, and reversing that stance would require pushing out all the restaurants people know and love.

you can beat any analogy to death, it doesn't mean you should.

Twitter is not analogous with a town, though. That's the thesis of my original comment, and I'm using your metaphor to explain how Twitter is not a public asset.

You've gotten lost in the weeds, my original comment said town hall (or town square if you prefer), and twitter IS analogous to a town hall where people gather to speak to audiences.

Town got pulled in when I pointed out that rights over speech wrt to these places still exist even though someone can move to a different town (to presumably gain access to a different town hall).

> And people can just move to a different town, that doesn't stop us from having laws in place to guarantee rights in the current town.

Towns are municipalities, twitter is a private company. The more I look at this metaphor, the less it makes sense

Well, yes and no. Yes, we need regulation if we want to hold people accountable for what they say online. No, in the sense that discriminating between large and small services is a bad idea. Scale has nothing to do with it, smaller services don't deserve to get off scott-free just because they didn't hit 'Twitter-scale' yet.

Again, the biggest issue here is the public misconception that Twitter (or any of the internet) is a benevolent platform. Legislation cannot change that.

Small platforms need to be held to a different standard. If you are the global village square platform worth 44 billion you get different rules compared to a wordpress blog with no traffic where you can make comments. Scale matters.

At least in America, that's not really how Rule of Law works. At least WRT individual rights like Free Speech.

That's a tautology, my original comment was pointing out that the law needs to be updated. Pointing out that the current law isn't like that is not interesting.

Rule of Law is simply the principle that we cannot apply legal concepts discriminately: https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...

Nobody is above the law, not the meek nor the mighty.

Someone should go tell that to existing utility companies so they can argue they can't be more highly regulated than other companies.

aka, we already have precedence for this sort of thing.

This is an idiosyncratic understanding of "rule of law." Laws in America routinely discriminate between small and large entities. For example, the FMLA only applies to companies with 50 or more employees.

> Hopefully people realize that trusting $COMPANY will never deliver you anything good. We either regulate the things we care about, or let stuff like this happen. Either way, the world keeps spinning.

Or an alternative: people can use social media that doesn't suck whenever something like this happens, and the market forces will punish the stupidity on twitter or any other platform that forgets what's owed to its userbase

I have no idea why your first instinct is to regulate when twitter doesn't have a monopoly and there are several very similar alternatives that are growing in popularity

> because they completely disregarded preexisting company policy for dealing with political figures

That was the company policy.

Public figures were largely exempt from the rules except when their tweet was egregious.

Not sure why you think this is some conspiracy when it was blatantly obvious.

> Public figures were largely exempt from the rules except when their tweet was egregious.

So are you saying that the two tweets I posted above aren't egregious?

> Not sure why you think this is some conspiracy when it was blatantly obvious.

I can't find that allegation anywhere in my comment. What was there was the obvious inconsistency between not banning e.g. the Ayatollah for the above comment, but banning the former president

Can you find any tweets from the former president that were even comparable to the two tweets I posted?

> but banning the former president

Trump was banned for inciting an insurrection which is illegal.

> Trump was banned for inciting an insurrection which is illegal.

So we should ban everyone who's suspected of doing something illegal then? They don't even have to be charged with any crimes, we just have to be convinced that they did something illegal in order to have grounds for banning them

A ban on a social media site is something done by a private party, not a function of the justice system.

So yes, bans can be done without any legal action. And really that's how it should be for the sake of proper function.

Otherwise I could just spam HN over and over, until HN actually managed to sue me and win the lawsuit. Can you imagine how long that would take?

Mind you, spam is very much free speech, so it'd be interesting to see which law that would be breaking.

It was pretty far past suspected. If I was a person of influence and I was sending mobs to break into govt buildings I would have been arrested, especially if it went on for months leading up to it and I said I love what you are doing, you are beautiful. We've tried to keep presidents out of actual criminal implications, we probably made a big mistake as a country when ford pardoned nixon. I do doubt trump's attempt to overturn the election, encourage sedition etc will lead to him facing actual criminal sanctions.

Multiple countries have passed laws forcing social media companies to remove content seen as inciting violence. They don't have a choice but to remove that sort of content.

They gave people multiple chances. When you encourage violence, spread medical advice where it's against actual medical advice, when it hurts people and you are no doctor either, when you send people out to attack others, encourage deadly violence, then after a few chances it seems reasonable to ban them. I wonder if musk will release what must have been a huge amount of worrying about much anger this would cause right wingers. This supposed scandalous impact of these selected disclosures won't have much impact because it's not that surprising that there was a limit. Also it's a private company, they can make any decisions about letting people use their system that they want to. Do you think Fox News has been tortured about how much of trumps shenanigans they should put on the front page of their website? They clearly reduce coverage of trump's foolishness, support for racists, etc. It's not a crime to do this, they are a free private company.

What does this have to do with my above comment?

This isn't about "right wingers" or any of these braindead arguments about "moderation being in the public interest", my point was that saying what Roth and others did was "normal company operation" is an outright lie and anyone who's actually paying attention knows this

Playing devil's advocate in Twitter's defense:

Is there any public information about how twitter handled the two examples you provided at the end there? Do we know for sure they actively chose not to take any actions?

If not, I'm not sure it is fair to claim they completely ignored them. They may have limited their reach via some kind of shadow banning. Action like that is harder to notice than an account ban.

Also, since your examples predate the particular ban we are discussing, do we know for sure there weren't policy changes in between. Perhaps even because of examples like the ones you list.

Personally, I wonder if Twitter might have a more American-centric view of the world and a higher sense of urgency for "events at home", so to speak. That could go some way to explaining what seems to be selective enforcement of their terms of service.