Thread by @doctorow

The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

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The best expert I know on the subject is @jilliancyork, my @eff colleague. She's published "an ongoing list" of "everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation."

You should read it.

jilliancyork.com/2021/01/10/eve…

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Here's some highlights:

“Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent."

York: "The only 'precedent' set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company."

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But political leaders around the world have already received this treatment: Lebanon, Burma, etc. Even the reach of the deplatforming is nothing new: last summer's US Iran ban saw blocks of everything, up to and including Etsy listings for "Persian dolls."

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"This is the biggest online purge in history!"

York: Yes, Twitter's kicked off a bunch of (supposed) Qanon accounts recently, but that's peanuts compared to 2019's purge of 1m+ "ISIS" accounts, "with zero transparency and the 'freeze peach' galaxy brains didn’t blink."

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"Kicking Parler off AWS is unprecedented/a bridge too far"

It's true that there's something fundamentally different going on when infrastructure companies do content-based takedowns than when the social media companies that use them do so.

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But this has happened plenty before, most notably when AWS kicked out Wikileaks in 2010, without Wikileaks having been charged with any crimes.

Companies that have even tenuous ties to Iran have also been kicked off of infrastructure providers' platforms.

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"This is communism"

York: No, this is capitalism (American style)

Me: That is, capitalism where, instead of breaking up monopolies, we deputize them to serve as de facto, unaccountable arms of the state.

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"Google Play/App Store's removal of Parler is a new precedent"

York: Nope - this has happened before. Remember when Tumblr had to institute a (terrible) nudity filter in order to get reinstated at Apple's app store?

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"Twitter won't let you hashtag #1984"

York: Twitter won't let you make a hastag out of any number (because the hashmark is also the number sign, and otherwise the '#1" in 'We're #1' would be a hashtag)

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York's list is a work in progress and she's asked for contributions from fellow content moderation/platform regulation experts via DM to @jilliancyork.

eof/