[minimaxir]

I'm not sure what you're alluding to regarding what happened on X during the election. If anything 2024 was smoother (very surprisingly) than what happened in 2020 even when Twitter had a Trust and Safety team, mostly because the election was not contested this time.

[threeseed]

Right wing accounts were heavily pushed in the later stages of the election.

I manage a number of business X accounts which are publish only and all switched to showing right-wing politicians, pundits and extensive amounts of Elon Musk. I created a new account to check and same thing. Even though when I selected interests I specifically chose non-political topics.

For me it was very clear then that whether it's Musk or Zuckerberg no one should have the ability to push political content.

[minimaxir]

It is true that Elon pushed right-wing accounts algorithmically (and is one of the reasons for the exodus to Bluesky), but "no politics ever" as a neutral content moderation stance to counter that factor makes it impossible for a social network to show what's happening now in the world and will make people go elsewhere for the information gap.

[intended]

No political content ever is a community growth stance and business strategy.

It is the right call, by frikking far.

There are a 3-4 horsemen of the apocalypse for online communities. The first two are most definitely politics and religion.

If these two topics are allowed on your forum, you are pretty much done. Flame wars, harassment, brigades etc. are going to be the highest you can expect.

This is going to force you into high amounts of comment removals and bans. The velocity of action, and anger of your users will mean that you can no longer communicate the rationale for your bans, or maintain transparency.

On top of this, you will start to attract groups who will want to use your community for astroturfing, or for targeting. So now you have to deal with the worst kind of adversarial behavior.

Getting rid of politics, is just simply better for the product.

I will also argue that there should be such product experiments conducted in the economy. We already have a multitude of platforms where we can discuss politics.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Getting rid of politics, is just simply better for the product.

What you need to do is distinguish between politics and partisanship. Political discussion is not only fine but important, as long as it's civil. Partisan signaling, on the other hand, is poison, because it's flamebait and does not lead to reasoned discussion.

[mrtesthah]

I'd argue that the apparent toxic nature of online politics is due to the design of the platforms hosting it (including the susceptibility of those platforms to manipulation by foreign govts and billionaires). There are a few different discussion platforms (e.g., vTaiwan) which are explicitly designed to help users converge on shared solutions rather than polarize them--we could simply encourage people to use those instead.