The difference is that Twitter didn’t ban conservatives for their political views but for violating their terms of service. In Trump’s case that was continued calls for violence and election interference, more than a hypothetical concern after his followers made an unprecedented violent attack on the U.S. electoral process. As you can easily verify, most conservatives were never banned: the people who were banned made repeated, deliberate violations of the legal agreement that they accepted.
They did not ban Trump for "continued calls for violence and election interference".
Look at the two Tweets they used as a justification of his ban [1]
> The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!
And
> To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.
Of course, in the blog post, Twitter claims to have "assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy"
If those two tweets are glorification of violence, then your post is calling for genocide.
Again, if those were all he’d posted and his followers hadn’t just responded to his past calls with a violent assault on the election process, he’d never have gotten banned. As you can see by reading the page you linked, this decision was made with that context in mind after years of crossing the boundaries, and they did not want their corporate resources potentially being used for additional political violence.
The problem is their claim was those two tweets were violent. If they just said they banned him for behavior outside of Twitter they wouldn't be lying. Instead they claimed two tweets that have literally nothing to do with violence are violent.
Look, we all know you’re making that up but if we take you at face value, you just defined conservatism as the beliefs bad enough to get Twitter’s famously hands-off moderators to act. Nobody got blocked for advocating for smaller government, business-friendly policies, or talking about their religious or family values – it was threats of violence, slurs, targeted harassment, election misinformation, etc. None of the conservatives I know would claim those as defining their beliefs, and they’d be rather insulted to have you define them that way.
Surely you can provide specific details of this alleged censorship? It was heavily covered here but even pretty conservative people didn’t see it living up to the PR claims.
Hunter Biden’s laptop was all anyone was talking about for days. They blocked non-consensual nudity but that’s consistent with long-running policy and had no impact on the political aspects any more than we needed to see Trump and Daniels in action to discuss whether payoffs were appropriate.
> you just defined conservatism as the beliefs bad enough to get Twitter’s famously hands-off moderators to act.
This sort of disingenuous reply really isn’t helpful. The GP was clearly accusing Twitter of enforcing their TOS for righty accounts, while not enforcing their TOS when lefty accounts would do similar things.
I don’t think they are correct, but your rhetoric is just going to alienate people and makes your argument look weaker.
Can you provide any examples? The poster rather has been rather conspicuously unable to do so, which is hard to reconcile with the broad policy they’re claiming, especially when there are counter examples of accounts which were not blocked because Twitter gave more leeway to political accounts.
The reason is simple: the things which got those accounts closed weren’t traditional conservative positions, and there were plenty of lefty/hard to classify accounts which were also suspended or banned for similar reasons but nobody is sticking up for their behavior and claiming it represents their larger political group.
Dude, you realize we can see the timestamps of your messages? You’re replying to a message left 4 hours ago claiming that something you wrote 2 hours later somehow contradicts it.
Now, as to that specific claim since you actually provided details we can see that it doesn’t support the claim. It’s a single account, not the imagined campaign account conservatives, and Twitter changed their policy around hacked materials specifically to allow what the NYPost did:
Again, nobody is saying that Twitter was perfect but there just isn’t evidence supporting the belief that they ran a discrimination campaign against conservatives. Even the much ballyhooed “Twitter Files” fizzled because it made it clear that they bent over backwards accommodating political figures.
Yeah, I think the current phrase for this is "delulu".
I give you an example but apparently its not the example you wanted. You expect me to list every right wing account that got pulled? The Babylon Bee got banned as well if that helps you get a grip on reality.
The twitter files never fizzled out, except in the NYT. This is just your unfounded assertion. They were literally a smoking gun.
Twitter took 14 days to change their policy re the Hunter Laptop to slow roll the story breaking fully before the presidential election.
And if those "Terms of Service" heavily aligns with left-wing ideology? Do we then finally concede that Twitter did, in fact, target or disproportionately affect non-left-wing users? Is our next point of discussion about whether we can allow such a huge societal discussion/debate tool to be aligned with a pre-defined set of principles that 50% of people don't agree with? Or rather, on a set of principles that we can't find more than 50% consensus on?
Either way, this is just like normal government laws. One of the big criticisms that Libertarians have over laws is that they're not universally enforced, so they end up being selectively enforced, which just means that "those with power" wield the laws against those they don't like. Same goes here with platforms like Twitter. The rules are vague, opaque, and their enforcement is seemingly random and at the whims of some faceless entity behind their enforcement process. If we all knew these supposed "terms of service" and they did, in fact, have very clear rules and guidelines then there would be absolutely no room for conservatives or anyone else to cry about being targeted.
> And if those "Terms of Service" heavily aligns with left-wing ideology?
First, they don’t - if they had, you would be able to provide an example rather than confabulating about imaginary scenarios.
Second, private companies are generally not obligated to provide you services on your own terms. If a bar kicks you out from screaming threats at other patrons, your rights are not being violated - go find a place which welcomes you.
Third, it’s not 50%, although I can understand why you’d make that up, but a fraction of a percent. Almost all conservatives were not banned because they didn’t repeatedly violate the terms of service. The ones who were kicked out were given warnings, chose to ignore them, and had the promised consequences.
But even if, as you argue, calling for violence against people is part of right wing ideology or culture, it still seems reasonable to prohibit that. We do have to draw a line somewhere even against things that may be ingrained in a particular culture and which may have a disproportionate effect on that culture.
But we should examine these choices in a principled way. Still, prohibiting calls for violence doesn’t seem like a gray area…
I will not use calls for violence as an example for this argument I'm making. I specifically left it vague so we could all apply our own minds on it.
But if i had to pick one it would be the Trans issue. Misgendering and having some rather "blunt" debates on this topic meant the platforms usually sided with the trans or left-wing party.
As for calls of violence: there are many examples where anti-white and anti-right calls for violence and extermination go unpunished and swept under the rug to be memory holed. Let's start by making this a bad thing across the board.
The entire doc has an "aura" of being fair, and "protecting" the weak. But it ends up stifling debate and genuine discussion because report-brigades and coordinated attacks by left-wing institutions and left-wing activists (with way too much time on their hands because they are full-time activists) end up targeting right-wing individuals for benign and not-harassing behaviour. I've seen my fair share of anti-white and anti-republican hateful comments and calls for violence, that I don't know why you even need to see examples. Look for them everywhere, even on HN.
Look, this is a very diffuse topic. You're not going to get a clear example and we don't know what was happening behind the scenes at Twitter. But it's very telling that most tech companies are predominantly left-wing donors and have left-wing ideologies. Even if they act to be as impartial as they can, their bias will show because they have anti-republican discriminatory hiring practices.
So, to be clear, you’re saying that conservatism is synonymous with directly attacking “other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”? I couldn’t agree with such a broad claim about millions of people.
"Misgendering and having some rather "blunt" debates" was my example, and that doc absolutely targets it even though arguably misgendering and having blunt debates on the trans issue is not "directly attacking “other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.” according to your accusation.
Surely you can agree that, if the rule is no "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals", a conservative who is arguing that personal pronouns are silly is either compelled to bow to their opposition or violate the rules. Or that, in an argument about illegal immigration, a conservative forbidden from "asserting that members of a protected category are more likely to take part in dangerous or illegal activities" will find it impossible to convey their belief that illegal immigrants are more likely to commit crime.
I don't personally agree with either position, but those rules clearly give conservatives an explicit disadvantage.
And the implicit advantage was more clear- I don't have a twitter account, but whenever I followed a link there, there were piles of recommended tweets about how white people are all racist, or complaining about toxic masculinity / mansplaining / manspreading, or how christians are evil and hate women, or how much boomers suck- all of this clearly in violation of the rules, none of it censored. Well, maybe some of it was censored, I wouldn't know. But they certainly left quite a lot untouched.
> Surely you can agree that, if the rule is no "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals", a conservative who is arguing that personal pronouns are silly is either compelled to bow to their opposition or violate the rules.
The only thing they are not allowed to do is make direct targeted attacks against a specific person. You can say this is a dumb policy, you can rant about the concept in general, all you can’t do is say “@alice you’re really named Bob”.
Similarly, you can rant about immigrants and they wouldn’t do a thing as long as you could resist specifically targeting people.
Again, my point isn’t that Twitter was perfect or that they had solved every issue for balancing freedom of speech in an open forum but simply that rules against targeted attacks are not anti-conservative unless you have a very negative view of conservatism. It’s popular to try to score in-group points by whining about censorship but there’s a reason why nobody has been able to provide examples of actual conservative ideas being censored, because they know as soon as they do it’ll turn out to be something else which most people consider reasonable or, like the NYPost ban for hacked materials, a decision affecting one account which was reversed.
The rules are designed as such so that "well meaning" and well-thinking individuals such as yourself can provide an aura of protection over their actions, and "technically" be right. But in practice, the debate is definitely stifled in one direction.
Just look at the list of "notable Twitter bans", and you'll see a pattern. Among the clear "incitement of violence" and bot-accounts, there is a huge pattern of "we got banned and we don't know why, but we're vocal about X,Y,Z". One has to read between the lines. I'd be all for your argument and with you if we could have a clean-room look at the Twitter data to confirm, but we don't have that. Where is the twitter ban dataset that we can all have a look at?
Unfortunately, your beliefs align with that of the oppressor's side, so you don't see these and it'll be uncomfortable for you to go out on a limb. You think the system is "working as expected" and "they're only banning you if you target specific people".
