People were banned for bigotry, anti-Semitism, racism, spreading conspiracy theories, advocating political violence, harassment
Again you say, so again I ask:
an obvious attempt at disinformation
you're signal boosting the conspiracy theories
The new owner is literally tweeting conspiracy theory
It was an attempt to be responsible as a social media platform.
20 years ago the government said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and used that pretense to start a war. If social media existed then as it does now, the government would have requested the deplatforming of people questioning that narrative. They would have been painted as spreading misinformation.
And even if you do question that hypothetical, the question remains, why do you trust the government to decide what is true and what is false, and then "request" that people be silenced who disagree? With as many times as the power held in government has changed hands over the years, why should anyone willingly accept and even champion a precedent for that sort of censorship?
Why are you so devoted to wanting to be told what you're allowed to say, and someone deciding for you what opinions are right and wrong?
- - -
I asked those questions before, and if you wanted to answer them I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, but here's something new. If you think people should be removed from social media if they spread misinformation and conspiracy theory, what about all the misinformation we learned about in one of the latest reveals from the twitter files? First some quotes:
“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.”
“Falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.”
“Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”
These are the words of Yoel Roth, who had the insider knowledge at Twitter to KNOW that a think tank had pretended that Twitter was filled with Russian Bots, while many news agencies ran story after story that said this was all real. In the end, Twitter decided to do nothing about any of this. Seeing as we all now know this was very much misinformation and literal conspiracy theory, do you feel CNN, NBC News, and The New York Times should be removed from all social media for misinformation?
Because if you create a precedent that says people who post misinformation should be removed from social media, major political parties and anyone else with power will use that power to silence their critics. If you want to keep an eye on Musk and make sure he's not doing the same with his power, I fully support you there, and I welcome any journalists who will challenge him to justify his actions whenever anyone is removed from the platform.
But if you want that sort of thing to be about power and not partisanship, it has to be a two way street, and you have to criticize when people you don't agree with are removed from social media platforms as well. If not, it just drives everyone to situational ethics and keeps us all divided.