Moderation tools have been weaponized in the troll propaganda war.
Post an insightful and highly liked reply to a controversial topic, watch the likes roll in, and then suddenly go dark after about three minutes.
View the thread incognito, and the popular comment cannot be found.
Trolls brigade-block-and-report views they don't like, and your reply gets memory-holed until a human moderator can review it.
Hours or days later your comment gets restored, but the damage is done.
Of course troll armies are mining old tweets for any violation, so they can remove you from the conversation and manufacture the illusion of consensus.
Comparisons with the old media always neglect to mention the unique protections these platforms enjoy. Unlike the old media, they aren't responsible for the content they publish.
If they'd prefer to be treated like publishers, not platforms, they should also have the responsibility of publishers, not the protections of platforms.
But as long as they remain platforms, they have a unique responsibility to respect the freedom of speech of everyone.
As always, the question becomes: who decides which people are to be silenced?
Because combined, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have an effective monopoly on modern public discourse.
which extensively quotes Twitter and gets much of their leads and sources from Twitter.