Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Twitter was supposed to be a digital "public square." Instead, it censored accurate information & banned an elected head of state, Trump, even though Twitter's own employees said he hadn't broken the rules. Why is that? And what should be done about it?

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/twitter-brok…

Internal Twitter discussions made available to @MTaibbi @BariWeiss & me show that Twitter employees created secret blacklists that prevented tweets they disagreed with from trending and limited the visibility of particular users.

https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600?s=20&t=DIZN1Cg5fhYV9C6Ldrl8-A

Twitter’s most controversial decision by far was to permanently suspend President Donald J. Trump from its platform on January 8, 2021, which upset many liberal and left-wing leaders around the world, not just Trump supporters in the United States.

https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602376408457654272?s=20&t=2DUKRm6vYfdrlVp6fMujfA

And now we have discovered that the Twitter employees who investigated the matter concluded on the morning of January 8 that Trump’s tweets had not incited violence — not even in a “coded" way.

https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602367643553599512?s=20&t=2DUKRm6vYfdrlVp6fMujfA

Not only did Twitter decide to ban Trump, despite the conclusion from employees that he had not broken Twitter’s rules, it also decided to keep on its platform other heads of state and political leaders who Twitter employees concluded had incited violence.

What changed? The pressure both inside and outside of Twitter simply grew too great to resist. At the time it felt like all of polite society was demanding Trump’s ban, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, influential tech journalist Kara Swisher, ADL, and many others

Why the double standard for Trump compared to other political leaders including Khamenei? I think a big part of the reason is simply local: Twitter employees are mostly Americans and mostly based in the U.S. and thus far more invested in politics here than in other nations.

Yesterday, in response to the Twitter Files controversy, @Jack Dorsey wrote, “Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice. I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally.”

getrevue.co/profile/jackja…

Dorsey is repudiating his original vision of Twitter as a single global digital public square for a far more fragmented information system.

“I believe many companies can build a phenomenal business off an open protocol,” he wrote. “For proof, look at both the web and email.”

I love the web and email, but neither provided the digital town hall experience that Twitter provided.

The alternative to Dorsey’s vision would be to regulate Twitter and Facebook like we do other “natural monopolies,” such as electric utilities, water companies, and railroads.

People who are censored or suspended from social media utilities could appeal their censorship through some sort of special court system.

The main argument for such an approach is that democracies require a town square so people can debate ideas across ideological lines.

Following that argument, it is the role of the federal government to prevent the operators of the public square from denying people the right to speak.

The argument against it is that the remedy could be worse than the poison.

Governments would quickly find themselves facing the same problem as Twitter in deciding who should be allowed to speak and who shouldn’t.

In retrospect, Dorsey’s vision of a single digital town square was hopelessly naive.

Every website has to make some decisions about content moderation if only to enforce laws, including the one upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Virginia v. Black (2003), against issuing threats of violence against “a particular individual or group of individuals.”

The question is who should make those decisions and how.

/END

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/twitter-brok…