[rscoots]

>Trump was a bigger threat to journalism while he was in office than any content moderation rules Twitter could ever enforce.

Besides idle threats to "open up the libel laws" and temporarily blocking random journos from white house events, I don't see how this could possibly be true.

Two things can be bad at once. In measurable terms I'd say opaque, coordinated social media bans are the greater and more permanent of the evils here. We can't deflect to Trump forever.

[AnimalMuppet]

I think I agree with you. But I also agree with enumjorge when he says that we need to acknowledge that the unchecked spread of disinformation is a real problem. Worse, it can be driven by malice in a coordinated campaign. And it's a real problem that, when someone gets to define and censor disinformation, then they define disinformation, and they may be biased (or worse, part of a coordinated campaign).

I don't have an answer. But we can't find a workable answer without recognizing both sides of the problem.

[enumjorge]

Secretly subpoenaing journalists’ phone records is not an idle threat. Trump tried to change the results of a democratic election. Because of his lies armed protestors broke into the Capitol building while congress people were in it in order to disrupt ratifying Biden as president. Neither one of those were idle threats. They were direct attacks on our form of government. They happen to fail but those attacks were real.

I’m not saying social media censorship isn’t bad. Of course having a few tech companies control the information that most people see is problematic. What I’m saying is that allowing those platforms to act as a megaphone for misinformation is also a huge issue. Censorship and propaganda are both tools of abusive governments.