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The previous twitter had (somehow) moderation. You would think what you want about it but you were free to use your free speech right elsewhere.
The difference is that Musk says that it gives you this canal but he lies because he is still moderating the network, except the moderation now favors far right content.
That’s not more free speech than before, that’s just a pro-fascist moderation.
Which "wrong think" specifically got people banned? Because the vast majority of conservatives on the platform did not get banned, so I'm left wondering which exact people banned for what exact reasons you're thinking of. Trump was removed after the Jan 6 assault on the capital for provoking that violence and repeatedly lying to his followers about the election, which, weirdly, is quite different than for being a conservative.
See e.g. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/journalist-sues-twitter-...
Getting banned for wrongthink on the old Twitter was a rite of passage, almost every content creator I follow (mostly gaming youtubers, nothing spicy or even controversial) got banned at least once.
The tweet I've seen wasn't directed at anyone, just a sentence to the effect of "Women are different from men". By a feminist, so likely not a conservative.
Harassing a trans person is terrible behavior, sure. Like with any other person. (I.e. that's not a wrongthink issue.)
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.
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.
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 we should examine these choices in a principled way. Still, prohibiting calls for violence doesn’t seem like a gray area…
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.
Do you have an examples?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230407140923/https:/help.twitt...
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
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".
I never see spiteful comments about people who work for British American Tobacco, BP or the Sacklers and these companies have, in my opinion, done far more damage to people, families and society in general.