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Notes -
Recent takeover of Twitter by Mr. Musk and the consternation it has caused even on moderate sites such as HN has me thinking about defences of censorship and complaints about "politically unreliable" figures having the power to shape peer-to-peer discourse online.
A possible reason to oppose Mr. Musk here is that perhaps conservatives have it wrong: maybe the moderation team before was fair-minded and pluralist, but now it will replaced with die-hard partisans hell-bent on preventing inconvenient truth from reaching the masses. This argument doesn't require one to defend partisanship of SNS moderation, so it can be deployed in a wider range of situations. Were the premise correct it is at least possible for the change to be for the worse. However recent revelation that leftists from around the world are given privileged access to twitter curation team which would then promote their niche perspectives thus giving them dispropotinate reach, has harmed the prospects of premise being true. As the decline of politics related "trending" since Mr. Musk is in charge.
Maybe one thinks that moderation wasn't neutral before, and won't be after, but still wants to oppose Mr. Musk. If one feels that ownership of a platform with 400M MAU confers unlimited right to influence public discourse, ie "It is a private company.", then one can hardly object now that show is on the other food.
But sometimes a smarter argument is made, namely that what was removed was hatred and incitement to violence. And if this meant that it was overwhelmingly rightists that were shut-down, this reflects poorly on them, and not on Twitter. But as Twitter itself promoted a racially preferential movement, the deathtoll of which is, despite its short existence, in the dozens (not to mention the second-order Ferguson Effect), one questions if minimizing violence is its goal.
But maybe all BLM violence is justified as it brings us towards a more just and peaceful world in the future ("Can't make an omelette without shattering shells."), while rightist violence only hastens the descent into a dystopia. For this to work, it has to be shown that a BLM protest which neither burnt, looted, nor murdered, is less effective of convicing the people of its cause, than what actually occured. To this one can object in two ways a) violent protest can show the necessity of a thin blue line that protects the people, thus backfiring and showing that actually Fund the Police is the answer or b) more empirically, that studies show that violence decreases support of cause in favour of which violence occurs.
Why is twitter green? It shows up as <span style="color: darkgreen;">Twitter</span> in the html.
Another concern is that twitter is actively still working on "reducing impressions on hateful content". Other than that, as musk says, twitter hasn't changed its moderation practices significantly - when will it, and to what? No clue what twitter's moderation or speech landscape looks like in a year or two, but will it necessarily be less suspend-rightwing-y? (not saying it will or won't be, I genuinely have no idea). Musk's recent space also mentioned his desire to crack down on "untruthful" content, and as a rdramacel, idk - being forced to distinguish funny troll content from true content is incredibly useful in teaching people (and was for me) how to figure those things out.
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