If you run a community, you need consistency. Members need to know where the boundaries are in regards to how you can act and what is/isn't acceptable.

Twitter doesn't really do this well. If you agree with the staff political stances, you can basically get away with anything. If you're popular enough (or a large company), you can often get away with things that would get a less popular user banned.

For example, contrast what happens when a left wing user breaks the rules and attacks people and what happens when a right wing one does it. It seems like the former will get punished a lot less harshly for the same offence.

Twitter needs to stop this, and enforce the rules for everyone in every situation.

Twitter, for example, ban political trolls and populists, but tolerate terror organizations and their supporters. Like what the actual fuck...

You are always going to fail at moderating millions of users. It just depends how bad you fail.

There are and have been many alternatives, but the balance between moderation and userbase is delicate. Assuming a minimum of "only moderate illegal content": Too much moderation and you might get a large userbase, but you get boring content or loud complaints from those moderated, and it discourages real conversation. Too little moderation and you get fun but chaotic/edgy content that drives away an even bigger chunk of people, and also discourages real conversation.

It seems to me that people who want Twitter to moderate less are either looking for the best of both worlds, which might be impossible, or really just want Twitter to be like 4chan, not because they really think it's "what's best", but because they want to attack their enemies in the social/political war, and that would be a big symbolic win.

There's nothing strange about that either - Twitter only acts to moderate when it has context and/or gets bad press. It's no surprise that American hot-button issues are the most moderated[1] by Twitter, and less sor for heinous, explicit threats to life in a language spoken by < 1 million speakers halfway around the world, or election misinformation in Kenya. That sort of thing never gets on Twitter's radar, and shouldn't come as a surprise.

1. This is a result of resource constraints, and Twitter's own sense of self-preservation. There is only one jurisdiction that can dissolve Twitter, and is also likely its largest revenue source; naturally, that gets an outsized fraction of Twitter's limited engineer-hours and moderator-hours.

We don't have a code of conduct or any of the nonsense. Someone violates it and we catch it, they're gone. (Also that's subjective to time based on how many times we caught them as well) End of.

When twitter starts having strong opinions about what content is acceptable or not outside of abuse, then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it.

The issue, and this isn't a twitter specific issue, is that the line between preventing abuse and censoring content is not a clear or distinct line at all - some users want every art installation to have a trigger warning before it while other users hold the firm political opinion that the mixing of different races is unethical.

It's not clear that Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit) has ever been good at navigating that line, or that they should be in that business. Reddit is somewhat successful in that most of the moderation happens at least at a subreddit level, so that if you disagree with a given community you can simply move to a different one.

Not all social media needs to be constant exposure to other people's viewpoint (especially given that "other people's viewpoint" often is a euphemism when marginalized groups that tend to find the fediverse cozy are concerned).

If having to pick between flawed corporate moderation and flawed human moderation, the flawed human approach is often better for this group of people.

1. There isn't enough communication from moderators about why tweets are removed and users are banned. There is a missed learning opportunity when users don't get to hear why they are being moderated.

2. Bans are probably too harsh. If you can't come back having learned from your mistakes, why learn at all?

Most of it is a scaling issue, which is the same reason that popular subreddits are a predictably negative experience while niche subreddits tend to be well regarded.

But Twitter doesn't. Hacker News doesn't. Reddit doesn't.

All three of these large Social Media sites require moderators to police the actions of their users. This isn't new or exotic, this is just how the web typically works. Forums, Usenet, Mailing lists, IRC, BBS, its always been like this.

If you want to try to make a new social network with different moderation systems (ex: user-based blocking), feel free to do so. But I've hung out enough on 8-chan to know that you'll have to deal with Swatters and Doxxers almost immediately, who are looking for an unmoderated coordination medium, and they'll take advantage of your features. You'll also have to deal with lesser forms of spam and advertisements: Cryptocoin spam these days, but it used to be Viagra, or Nigerian Prince scams.

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The question isn't "Twitter shouldn't be allowed to moderate its users". The question is if Twitter made the right move here or not.

So now lets actually discuss the crux of the issue: is spreading COVID19 misinformation a big enough reason to warrant a banning? I of course agree with the move. Our hospitals are filling up with the Omicron variant and the vast majority of these patients are not-vaccinated. Twitter leveraging their reputation to say that Marjorie Taylor Green is a net benefit to society.

Twitter repeatedly conflates organised spam / abuse / brigading, with sincere criticism and disagreement. They've shown a shocking disregard for differences of opinion, while refusing to develop tools to allow users with large followings to quickly cut off a mob attack.

This has put them in a position where they're both overly censorious - removing satire accounts, shadow banning without notice and using 'verified' status as a form of punishment; and simultaneously failing to engage with real abuse of the platform.

Presumably because to deal with real abuse and spam would be difficult and costly. Look how long it took them to remove fake / bot users who were being used to target political campaigns.