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Comment by blockmarker | Hacker News Reader

It was inevitable when they started censoring the red team. I for one am glad that they are researching how to do it, social media is the new public square, and no entity should be able to control it.

The article itself says that Republicans are skeptic about the government deciding when it is politically fair, so it will probably end up being a more elegant solution, like removing CDA 230.

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Wouldn't removing CDA force tech companies into more censorship, not less? Where is the elegance with that approach?

Here's the EFF on the importance of CDA 230 for people not familiar with it: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

Edit: also no entity does control social media. There are a decent amount of different sites (Reddit, 4chan, twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Hackernews, Discord, and a bunch of smaller ones) I think a lot of the issue is that the goalposts for what we consider okay as a society have moved in the last decade or so. For example people care a lot more about hate towards LGBT people, and conservatives are way more likely to run afoul of that. As a interesting side note there have been social media sites started to try to get away from the "censorship" but they have yet to actually catch on.

I really don't believe it's Twitter's fault that a small subset of users are unable to follow the rules of their service. People get reported for breaking the rules and if they do it often enough they get banned. They can't relax their enforcement because one group of people breaks the rules more often.

The problem is not that users aren't following the rules. The problem is that enforcement is, shall we say, very selective. To give but one example, Mitch McConell's account just got banned for posting a video of a protest outside his house.

The Mitch McConnell campaign account got frozen after it was reported for posting a video that contained threats (towards the candidate), which is against the Twitter TOS.

I don't agree with this action, but it's consistent with their TOS. I don't believe I've seen other campaigns that have posted videos of people threatening the candidate so I can't make a judgement call about enforcement consistency.

I don't know if you're intentionally trying to mislead by not mentioning _which_ candidate, or if you've been misled yourself by fake news, but the violent threats in the video were agains McConnell himself, from a crowd gathered outside his house, and not by McConnell himself against anybody else.

I said towards the candidate while only mentioning one candidate. That's not obfuscating in any way.

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