Originally Posted by
gimmick
What world leaders or The Left are we referring to, after Twitter started banning people for inciting violence and/or spreading disinformation?
Also twitter isn't a publication. They do have to remove hate related posts and few others because they are a global platform. EU enforces that. So instead of splitting the followers, they follow EU regulation.
This wasn't about EU regulation. Even if it was, it's extremely trivial to simply cut off display of tweets to people from specific geographic areas. Nice try, though.
Oh, and to answer your first question:
In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Facebook kept up posts that it had been warned contributed to violence. In India, activists have urged the company to combat posts by political figures targeting Muslims. And in Ethiopia, groups pleaded for the social network to block hate speech after hundreds were killed in ethnic violence inflamed by social media.
“The offline troubles that rocked the country are fully visible on the online space,” activists, civil society groups and journalists in Ethiopia wrote in an open letter last year.
For years, Facebook and Twitter have largely rebuffed calls to remove hate speech or other comments made by public figures and government officials that civil society groups and activists said risked inciting violence.
The companies stuck to policies, driven by American ideals of free speech, that give such figures more leeway to use their platforms to communicate.
But last week, Facebook and Twitter cut off President Trump from their platforms for inciting a crowd that attacked the U.S. Capitol. Those decisions have angered human rights groups and activists, who are now urging the companies to apply their policies evenly.
That's from the alt-right rag known as the NY Times, just three days ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/t...k-twitter.html
So basically Twitter ignored disinformation from the left, ignored other leaders around the world inciting real violence, ignored the repeated incitement of violence during the summer riots (many tweets praised the violence as "necessary"), and suddenly they've grown a conscience and banned Trump for supposedly inciting violence.
Yeah, total coincidence. Not biased at all, right?
They have labeled exactly zero left-wing posts as disinformation. They have banned exactly zero other world leaders for inciting violence. They have put warning labels on exactly zero left-wing posts.
You can keep dancing around this and cite EU regulations, terms of service, and a supposed campaign against misinformation, but none of this makes any sense. They have shown zero consistency, and this is clearly politically motivated. If you aren't swift enough to see that, just admit it.
There is a greater debate whether they should be censoring this stuff at all. As I said, the truth is that they shouldn't ban or censor any world leaders or major politicians. However, if you're going to advocate such censorship, it needs to be done equitably and fairly. Instead, they have been ignoring these "ToS violations" for years, and yet suddenly they spring to action when they want to defend a woke cause or censor Republican ideology.
The hypocrisy is just stunning. Weeks after Donald Trump's stolen tax returns were discussed in detail in the NY Times -- and Twitter did nothing -- they banned the NY Post and the Hunter Biden story because it violated the "hacked materials" policy. What?
They banned Martina Navratilova -- a famous left-wing lesbian tennis player -- for speaking out against allowing trans athletes to ruin women's sports.
How many more examples do you need to understand that Twitter is being highly censored in order to push a leftist agenda?
Sure, you can make the argument that they presently have the legal right to do it. I won't argue with that. But the question here is whether or not they SHOULD do it, and whether such behavior is appropriate for a democracy supposedly based upon free speech and freedom of expression. The answer is NO.
Twitter is a giant online public square where politicians (major and minor) speak to their constituency, where people get information from their governments (all over the world), and even where celebrities and corporations make announcements. It is a pseudo-public space with a massive reach. By shutting off communication from portions of one political side, they are committing acts of censorship -- even if such censorship is presently legal.
If you were running Twitter, would you ban major politicians? Do you think that's good practice? Should I start banning users here because they have different political views than me?