Similarly, it's so minor in comparison to previous examples of Twitter's past suspensions for real free speech violations that nobody on the right is going to come to the suspension "victim's" defense.
This is probably illegal (anticompetitive) and even if not it will destroy faith in corporate social media and I can’t wait. Good to flush the system so the flood of LLM bits doesn’t do too much damage.
This means he’d have failed to achieved his purpose, since TikTok is certainly a competitor even if the medium is video rather than text, but I also don’t think he understands social media all that well.
I do not think it’s amazingly healthy to tolerate somebody who would go out of their way, using the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, & making a fresh account named “fucku (foxtrotucku[sic])” with the sole purpose of replying to a singular comment (mine)
Quite literally, Bostons childrens fucking hospital has been receiving direct bomb threats, death threats against doctors, & other shit directly because of LibsofTikToks extreme stretching of cherry-picked “truths”
If you are trying to say you know better about this than the state government of Massachusetts, & even the feds - please do let me know why you think this way, whether or not you think your viewpoint is best for a civil society, & whatever other reasons you believe I’m not able to accurately apply the meanings of “incite” or “instigate”
This is a very strange hill to have an opinion on other than “this is very bad and dangerous” when a childrens hospital affiliated with one of academias (Harvard/Cambridge universities) premier teaching hospitals (Mass General as a whole - which the childrens hospital is affiliated with.) is receiving bomb threats & direct threats of lethal harm to several employed doctors, as well as their support staff.
I’ve come to the pretty reasonable conclusion that there’s no good faith discussion to be involved when one side is “anything that leads to threats of domestic terrosism against a childrens hospital is a bad thing” & the other is “buh, buuh - have u considered that death threats against childrens hospitals might actually be the way of righteousness? This sociopath has thoughts they think you’ve yet to consider!”
I fully support directing resources to tracking down and prosecuting people issuing threats. That would be a good use of police resources as opposed to some of the bullshit they spend their time on now. The people issuing threats were motivated to act by their ethics that were triggered by stories told by LibsOfTikTok, but also because they think they can get away with it, and that's the lever that we can move without compromise. Instead of trying to constrain speech, ensure people can have charged conversations on important social issues without the threat of violence.
That said, I also reject your inference that LibsOfTikTok necessarily bears direct responsibility for the people who issue violent threats. "Incitement" are exactly the cases where speech does convey responsibility, and I'm not sure they've crossed that line.
To say LibsOfTikTok is responsible would also imply that CNN and MSNBC's coverage was responsible for Hodgkinson's attempt to murder a bunch of Republicans. If you want to make that argument too then at least you're being consistent, but it's totally reasonable to disagree.
Given how you've framed this, you'll probably argue that LibsOfTikTok is not practicing "journalism", but there is no rigourous, formal definition of journalism that would distinguish what the media does from what LibsOfTikTok does. Media is factually wrong all of the time and its coverage clearly biased as well. We can agree that LibsOfTikTok is probably wrong "more" of the time and "more" biased, but moving the line of incitement, libel and defamation to encompass more speech is slippery and dangerous.
So much for free speech.
But if you really, truly believe in free speech and having a platform for sharing interesting ideas, then you want someone like Mr. Graham on the platform.
What I've noticed is that accounts tend to receive bans when a large number of users report them simultaneously (whether they are actually rule breaking has relatively little impact). It strikes me as possible that a bunch of Elon's fans reported the "I have a Mastodon account" post, and some moderator pulled the plug on the account on the assumption that that's what Elon would want.
To be clear, I'm not saying any of this would exonerate Elon. He put this stupid policy in place to begin with. If anything, the sheer scale of the pro-Elon toxicity I've seen in every Twitter link I've clicked today is a symptom of a much bigger problem that is slowly building on the platform.
Most platforms use some sort of automatic algorithm coupled with an army of people in "third world" countries doing actual first-level reviews and a smaller group people at HQ supervising/monitoring/working on the algorithms.
Well, except...he fired all those people. So now it's probably just "autoban and if there's enough noise, someone comes back and unbans."
When the elon jet reddit user got banned, it was probably the same thing - trolls/bots/muskies mass-reporting after a post hit the front page.
> We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.
> Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
And from Elon Musk:
> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.