Replies

“Does anyone know if Twitter is being sued for this behavior?”

Sued? What is illegal about it? Twitter is a private company run by leftist assholes. If you use their product, you are subject to their BS. Best recourse: avoid Twitter.

Yes, Twitter is a private company, but like any private company, Twitter has obligations to consumers. These obligations include truth in labeling; companies are not free to advertise A while systematically providing not-A, and hiding the bait and switch. Twitter offers a platform. It invites people to create an account and post. It makes money by attracting users. But if users are censored in a way that is invisible to the person being silenced, the open platform is a fraud.

I imagine that Twitter's lawyers will argue that the censorship is disclosed inferentially in the concept of community standards to which users consent when creating an account. But if Twitter exercises censorship while creating the illusion that one is still on the board, it is defrauding its users. People who are censored are being defrauded of the time and effort it takes to post. Even more importantly, they being silenced by being enticed to speak to an empty room while thinking they are addressing a community that they have chosen to engage.

I have no objection to private service providers policing their sites. If it were me, I'd start with banning vulgar and profane words and move on from there to abusive language and personal attacks. But I would support a regulation requiring that people who are censored be notified of the fact, and why. The censorship should be visible on the board as wellso that users are aware when a discussion that they presume is open is, in fact, being controlled and steered.

Seen on the Donald reddit board—
“Jack is using machine learning to reduce the influence of Trump supporters. This makes Twitter a political Superpac. Superpacs fall under strict regulations. Be careful @Jack”

More—
“also, if Twitter decides to ‘curate’ user content are they not then responsible for the content that stays up? Like if there are Twitter accounts calling for assassinations or such and Twitter does not take those down while they are taking other content down isn’t Twitter supporting/endorsing the assassination content? I am sure another pede can put this in the proper legal terminology, but I remember this point coming up when Spez was editing user comments and pedes were saying that Spez just opened the door to being accountable for all of the content posted on Reddit. They basically forfeited their neutral position of just being a public board with no control over content.”

And more—
“Suppressing conservative voices on Twitter clearly amounts to a “gift in kind” to the leftists

The value to the left would be huge $$

This angle is VERY important to push. Huge legal, $ ramifications here”