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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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I mean, or you could just recognize that it’s utterly ridiculous to take “75,000,000 great American Patriots” as somehow intended to pick out rioters specifically and thus constitute “indirect incitement.” If merely referring positively to any group whatsoever of which they’re a subset is doing that, then Trump would never be allowed to praise “people who support me” ok social media ever again.

We have no idea how many people wanted him banned that way,

The phrase “vocal minority” exists for a reason.

OK, so either Twitter was set up in a way that allowed a minority of partisan wackadoos to get their way over a more reasonable “silent majority” on one of the biggest social media decisions in history, or it’s just stuffed with partisan wackadoos full stop. If anything the former seems worse than the latter.

I mean, or you could just recognize that it’s utterly ridiculous to take “75,000,000 great American Patriots” as somehow intended to pick out rioters specifically and thus constitute “indirect incitement.” If merely referring positively to any group whatsoever of which they’re a subset is doing that, then Trump would never be allowed to praise “people who support me” ok social media ever again.

I didn't say any of this.

OK, so either Twitter was set up in a way that allowed a minority of partisan wackadoos to get their way over a more reasonable “silent majority” on one of the biggest social media decisions in history, or it’s just full of partisan wackadoos full stop. If anything the former seems worse than the latter.

I don't think most companies rely on democratic voting to determine policy, so it shouldn't surprise us that a small number of vocal people can have an effect much larger than themselves. But there was clear pushback, that pushback just wasn't enough. If we consider it as reasonable that voters get to decide what happens, then the people who "voted" in this case to ban him seem to be much more in number than those who don't. A democratic outcome, even if it conflicts with the morality of others.

I thought you were saying that the people pushing to ban him were a vocal minority. Now I’m confused.

There could have been a vocal minority. We don't know because the slack logs aren't available for us to peruse. There was also pushback from the TTS team and a few others who didn't see the tweets as violating any rules.