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by bronzeage 1811 days ago
Yes. It feels pretty right that you can't claim you're not editorializing if you decide to censure the leader of the country because of arbitrary reasons, like claiming coronavirus came from a lab is a conspiracy theory.

What happens in India is actually the opposite, it's the government requiring the censuring.

I'm always on the side of free speech. It shouldn't be up to Twitter to decide if coronavirus came from the lab, or if "mail in ballot fraud is very rare, as few as 0.001%" (a completely bonkers notion that was also later debunked, but served to prevent any discussion before the election despite it's absurdity).

1 comments

Near the beginning of the pandemic people were told to sanitize surfaces thoroughly as a way to inhibit the spread of Covid. Many people had doubts about this guidance, but if you tweeted that such measures were ineffective, Twitter would censor you and/or label you as a spreader of misinformation. Months later, a study finally confirmed that the chances of catching covid from a contaminated surface was extremely low. Therefore, sanitizing surfaces was no longer recommended or necessary. But it’s not like Twitter’s trust and safety team is going to go back and unban you in light of this.

The key takeaway is, if you are comfortable with Twitter taking such actions with potential ‘misinformation’ then you must also accept that what is considered correct at any point in time is subject to a potential reversal. The staff at Twitter is just as fallible as the rest of us.

I don't think your story about Twitter banning skepticism about surface cleaning is true. I remember being involved in several long Twitter threads on that topic with no one being banned.
Just because you didn't see it happen, doesn't mean it didn't happen. If we accept your report at face value. all you've proven is that their algorithm isn't 100% comprehensive regardless of impact/number of followers of the people, etc.

It seems far more reasonable to me that if POTUS or $randomCelebrity tweets something it will get more scrutiny from the moderation efforts at Twitter than I would if I tweeted the same thing.

My personal anecdote is more proof than what BuyMyBitcoins provided for his assertion.