[tsol]

It's strange though, when it involves lgbtq or politics they suddenly understand why Twitter may need to police certain kinds of conversations. But when the actors involved are foreign, suddenly those high minded ideals turn into ambiguity and 'Twitter understandably doesn't want to take a side'. Yet last month I was hearing on this very forum that inaction is indeed pushing a side

[SpicyLemonZest]

I've never seen even the most censorious Americans argue that Twitter should investigate every accusation that person A is paid by group B. That scenario has actually been playing out over the past few days on American politics twitter, with a couple high profile journalists being falsely accused of taking out PPP loans, but Twitter didn't moderate those accusations and as far as I can tell nobody thinks they should have.

I don't mean this as an insult against the author, because of course Americans don't have to fear being kidnapped or tortured over it! But I don't think it's right to see this as some kind of hypocrisy.

[notahacker]

I tend to see the reverse. People fume over social networks allowing people in, say, Myanmar to write about alleged events they have no way of verifying with political implications they don't understand in a language they don't understand because people are dying [mostly at the hands of a military that really doesn't care what social media thinks]. Then they get very unhappy if the same social network decides to block obviously mendacious nonsense posted by fellow Americans

Sometimes it's different people making the complaints, but weirdly, sometimes I'm not sure it is...

[root_axis]

It's not strange. Twitter is a U.S. company, of course it takes a deeper interest in matters of U.S. politics than it does about every other country on the planet.

[oarabbus_]

They said nothing about Twitter's behavior being strange. They said the strange part is people applauding Twitter's content moderation for certain topics, while justifying their inaction on others.

[sangnoir]

> They said the strange part is people applauding Twitter's content moderation for certain topics, while justifying their inaction on others.

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.

[oarabbus_]

No, read their post again. They're referring to people's perception of Twitter enforcement being strange, not twitter's enforcement.

[watwut]

The threats against lgbtq and especially trans run WILD on twitter. There are whole accounts dedicated to harassing them and outing them to huge amounts of followers. It takes super log for twitter to even delete a tweet.