EAllusion wrote:Twitter is really inconsistent about policy enforcement, and a lot of this advantages alt-right groups who repeatedly violate terms of service. There's no shortage of Nazis on Twitter acting like Nazis. It takes a lot, including bad luck, to get banned. The magabomber was issuing death threats on Twitter to media and his account was untouched. On the flip side, alt-right groups have repeatedly gotten people they dislike suspended and banned on Twitter by mass-complaining about out of context tweets, which has been asinine every time it has happened. Twitter's enforcement sucks because Dorsey really doesn't care and there's no desire to invest more in human moderation. It's no trouble at all to find examples of person A getting suspended or banned for things Person B did that did not result in the same action.
The game in this line of posting from you is pretending that people are getting banned for mere expression of conservative views, when typically what we are talking about is outright threatening and harassing behavior or inciting the same. That's why you don't outline specifically what conservative views you are talking about. Why was Milo banned again? Conservatives, even straight up Nazis, have Twitter accounts with no problem. Gab itself has an active Twitter account.
There's no reason to believe that social connections formed via Twitter are less sturdy than those formed on Gab and the reach of Twitter is obviously much more extensive than Gab. So the theory that being banned from Twitter is going to create a den of influential radicalization in Gab seems to be missing a few steps. What Gab does for forming and amplifying connections around an ideology, Twitter also does.
This isn't my observation at all. Or even the admission of Twitter itself. What's actually going on is Twitter silently starts to shadow ban popular conservative voices. That's not a ban. It's just an underhanded attempt to promote certain types of speech over others. No justification for this practice can be made.
If something crosses a line, like it's criminal, you don't quietly conceal it, you ban it. What you should do first is call the police... and then ban it when a court orders you to take it down. When you silently silence someone, what else could that be for? That's not a concern over "hate speech," you just don't like that guy's views.
In the case of people who are fully banned, no, I don't see what you're talking about either. I'd have to dig into all the people that have been banned. But it seems objectively obvious that Twitter goes after popular right-wing voices, while being completely cool with awful behavior from popular left-wing voices. Yes, a lot of unpopular wackos fall through the cracks. Which actually serves to prove my point. Twitter doesn't actually want to force nazis off its website. It wants to keep some number of them around for the purpose of creating their anti-conservative parodies.
You think they didn't know about Robert Bowers? Of course they did. They have lots of algorithms that will give them a list of people engaging in certain types of speech at the click of a button. They absolutely knew he existed and didn't give a damn because nobody was following him. He was, relatively speaking, a tiny and irrelevant voice. He was a useful idiot to make fun of when they wanted a screen cap of how racist and antisemitic conservatives are.
It would be interesting to compare. Why did Milo Yiannopoulos get banned? I'm not sure to be honest. Trying to look it up, it appears that he got banned because he made fun of the new Ghost Busters Girl Power movie. One of the actresses, Leslie Jones, got butthurt and cried racism. LOL. He referred to her as "barely literate." ROFL. On the other hand libs refer to conservatives as everything you can imagine, baby killers, rapists, racists, yada yada. I'm not seeing how the ban of Yiannopoulos is justifiable. What did he do? It appears that he was simply getting too popular. And he was getting really popular. He had hundreds of thousands of followers.
Milo is a very impolite person. But a racist? A nazi? LOL, no, I don't think so.
