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This is particularly hilarious combined with the "misinformation" angle where Twitter literally arbitrates truth. But I guess no censorship is ever enough.
It looks like everybody has their own level of tolerance there. For some it's OK to have super strict rules as long as they are consistently applied, for some it's ok to follow "to friends, everything, to enemies - the law" and apply rules in some cases while ignoring them in others, to some it's ok if you can find the rule to ban, no matter how tenuous the connection, but the rule must be found - and to some the ban has to happen no matter what, and if the rules are not enough, just invent the new ones and ignore them. Maybe it helps the censors to feel they're good guys after all.
As for the narrative, I am not sure it is countered that much. Surely, there were discussions about how to ban a particular deplorable account, and whether a particular deplorable tweet can be matched to a particular rule. That doesn't mean the team didn't have common goal of suppressing certain kind of speech. I mean, it is known that Trotsky and Stalin became bitter enemies at the end, and no doubt argued a lot before that, but that doesn't mean they weren't both communists and didn't have the common goal of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and build the Communist society everywhere. If some of the Twitter team disagreed about whether a particular tweet should be suppressed in a particular manner, that does not exactly disprove the narrative of the existence of the system of suppression based on politics and point of view. It just gives us an insight on its inner workings.
Keep in mind that this was pre-COVID. Most of Twitter’s biggest “well, ackshuallys” hadn’t yet become so salient.
The existence of disagreement is important, even if it was ineffective. Frankly, all these threads are a blur, but I got the impression other releases wanted to paint TTS as leading the charge. The bailey is something like “Twitter was so captured you couldn’t even find rules-lawyers,” and this helps to argue against that particular form.
I'm not sure the existence of disagreement is that important. The communists over their history were constantly Judean People's Front vs. People's Front of Judea, but is that of any use for the victims of communism? (except for the fact that you're never safe even if you're a communist - you may end up in a wrong fraction and be goolaged with the rest of them) Dissent is only valuable if it can lead to substantial changes and improvement. If it's a squabble about how to oppress the enemies of the people more efficiently, then for those who are declared the enemies of the people, it's of little value. It's sure interesting to know that there were different approaches to censorship at Twitter, and different fractions struggling for control over the levers, but ultimately it doesn't change the overarching picture of systemic censorship-eagerness.
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I thought most of this stuff was from October 2020 to January 2021; Twitter had begun well-ackshuallying in May 2020.
I suppose you’re right. I had the year wrong.
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