Seems more like twitter banned the author 9 years too late.
Maybe twitter could have given him a warning about his tweet and ask if he would like to delete it before the instaban algorithm hit
Getting a message saying something like "this message violates the rules today, so we're going to delete it" or "delete this message within a week or we'll have to ban your account" would seem more reasonable to me than immediate ex post facto enforcement.
That raises a bunch of different questions about what Twitter are doing to change history, and the way they represent their platform, but those are separate to the banning of users based on their history.
Besides, this might be motivated by Twitter acting on a complaint. It could be that Sarah Palin (or someone representing her) complained about the tweet recently, in which case Twitter need to deal with that now.
There is a very reasonable middle ground here. No one is demanding we all submit to corporate thought police. No one is being shunned from social media access without recourse. Just make a minimal effort to conform to routine societal decorum, and you can shit on Sarah Palin all you want.
Absolutely, I have blog posts from 2001 I leave up that are absolutely horrid.
In 2001 I was a 16 year old, who's father had died 12 days before his 13th birthday and was moved to another school a few months later where he had no friends and fell in with the punk/goth crowd. I didn't care about school, all I cared about was music and getting high or running around shows or the mall while tripping. I said stupid shit on livejournal under a username only my friends knew, mostly complaining about my mother and school. I now host those on RyanMercer.com, wholly attributed to me.
That's who I was when I was 16, it's not who I am now.
Now I post about problems we face as a civilization, I post about things that interest me, I post about things that scare me, I post about how we need to come together and put aside foolish things to focus on ensuring a better future for ourselves and our offspring but I'm not going to hide who I was 18 years ago. Now I put thought into my posts, I don't rush to a computer to type "oh my god I hate them all blah blah blah raging against society", I'm not going to try and cover that up as that's part of my experience, who I was is part of who I am, if anything it shows that people can mature.
It’s honestly a very immature tweet. It’s something I wouldn’t say
today. I have personally grown past the hate of the two party system.
I feel like I have a clearer and more mature view on American
elections, as well as seeing past the endless media designed to keep
most people angry. This tweet was from a different era in my life. I’m
not proud of it, yet it is a part of my history. Furthermore, it’s
nearly a decade old.
Or that by allowing them to stay on the platform, they provide an example that people can temper their political extremism over time by maturation and introspection, thereby disproving that the flyswatter techniques you seemingly prefer for the moderation of discourse may be ill-suited to actually promoting healthy discourse?
I'm not following the logic.
Then I read the actual tweet and lost all sympathy. It’s just so horrible, and, I think the author actually shows a lack of growth by dismissing it as this 9 year old “immature” mistake.
The tweet is hateful.
I do find someone old enough to attend a university, calling an elected official stupid cunt and a whore, horrible.