[jrmg]

I honestly can’t tell whether you think Twitter now, under Elon, is now less or more moderated than before, whether you are on the left or right of current political thought (or somewhere else entirely), or whether you consider unmoderated communication to be a good or bad thing (but I’m pretty sure it’s one of those).

[tourmalinetaco]

I honestly can’t tell you why almost any of that is pertinent to the conversation at hand.

Why does it matter whether he has shackled himself to one side of a political binary, or cares for the happenings of a singular website and its owner?

As for moderation, I believe they were lamenting the corporatization of the Internet and how it has become a hotbed for controlling the populace, rather than connecting the populace. Which would presumably fall under a preference for unmoderated communication.

[watwut]

Anyone who uses Twitter files as an argument is sucker for bad faith actors.

[paganel]

Like the Trump-Russia files?

[TheBigSalad]

Could you elaborate?

[paganel]

The US left took those Trump-Russia files as gospel, even though it turned out that the whole thing was most probably a set-up.

As such, the same US left now saying that one shouldn't take those Twitter files seriously is quite disingenuous, if anything, the Twitter files seem more real than any of that Trump-Russia fiasco.

[TheBigSalad]

The Trump Russia files were exposed as a 'work in progress' investigation from a former spy that wasn't supposed to be leaked yet. Stuff he was still researching. If you think the "US left" took them as "gospel", you may be consuming too much propaganda. Nobody thinks the Twitter files were fake, they just didn't reveal anything as damning as claimed. Is it surprising that the president's team asked them to remove (illegal) stolen pictures of his son's dick? Seems expected and reasonable.

[joiqj]

There should be some kind of Litmus test to see how a platform is moderated. You could use it to find where in the political spectrum the moderation team is to see if the platform suits you.

I propose, for example, "equating abortion to murder", "misgendering someone", "calling someone the f-word", "saying that f-words are molesters", etc.

Most of the big platforms (such as Twitter or Meta) are just in the middle. Twitter before Musk moved one point to the left, making misgenderisation a bannable offence, but I think Musk undid that. As a data point I have had comments flagged for doing the first one here, so you can tell where this community stands.

I have absolutely no faith in changes made by Musk, but I have to say I still remember the days when the platforms, instead of silencing everybody by default, trusted you to make a judicious use of the block button, like a grown-up would.