[chmod775]

> Basically the social media company argument is... we think people are too dumb to figure out what is "real" or not so we are going to censor.

Most platforms, Twitter included, just wanted to be dumb service providers. They don't want to spend money and carry responsibility moderating content.

It was large media outlets and the public outrage they produced over "fake news" and "the far right" that pressured them into taking a more proactive stance.

People like me who were opposing it back then and saying "you don't know what you're asking for" got labeled far right, and essentially bunched with Trump, which was hilarious to me as a left leaning European.

Newspapers now becoming angry Twitter is evenly applying the new rules - the rules newspapers lobbied for - is even more hilarious to me.

And you have to understand that Twitter did not make a mistake in how they responded to this. The article objectively was against their rules.

Whether these rules are good rules is another matter, but clearly the whole thing was dumb from the start.

[kelnos]

> Most platforms, Twitter included, just wanted to be dumb service providers. They don't want to spend money and carry responsibility moderating content.

Not really. They already spend time and money figuring out what content to promote and demote in order to increase engagement and maximize their ad revenue. They're just finding that the some of the kinds of things that tend to surface because of that are the kinds of things that they need to moderate, otherwise people (both users and advertisers) will get fed up with the platform and leave.