Regardless of your political views, behaviour such as this from tech monopolies/gatekeepers should be a cause of concern for anyone who'd like to keep their freedoms (esp of speech) intact.
The ideal scenario would be for people to use the web as how it was originally intended: ie, everyone having custom websites (and private emails) hosted on a VPS with an RSS feed so that your friends can follow your "feed". That way you'd own your content and wouldn't have to worry about censorships/account bans etc.
Discover-ability is just about the only downside with this.
This to me is Twitter becoming the want-to-be William Walker of Modern day Social Media. They’re conducting foreign policy as a private entity. Maybe they will suffer their own self-capture too.
Exactly, this shouldn't be a freedom of speech issue -- Twitter's freedom to say whatever it wants on Twitter should trump anybody else's freedom to say whatever they want on Twitter.
But it is a freedom of speech issue because Twitter is a monopoly/gatekeeper. That's what needs fixing.
AWS and Google Cloud are not the only infrastructure providers around ya know ;). There are plenty of other superior and cheaper alternatives like Linode, Vultr, Digital Ocean, OVH, Hetzner etc.
Regrading credit card processors, I don't see why it'd be necessary for a personal website. If it's about accepting donations, one could accept cryptocurrency.
Nowhere near "everyone" is on Twitter. I have to admit that I don't know a single person who is (I'm sure some of them are, it's not like I ask everyone if they use some specific platform).
The point is that a lot of media people is, and posting there gets you exposure. But as this group of people is much smaller than your proverbial "everyone", moving them off Twitter is a much easier affair.
I have often thought about what would happen if a small number of very high profile Twitter users with a wide reach to various different groups decided to set up their own servers (Mastodon perhaps) and asked their followers to go there. How many such high-profile users would you need before Twitter's momentum completely stops? I argue that that number is very small.
True, US didn't recognize the National Assembly, but many countries (Lima Group) didn't accept it... Canada for example formally recognized Juan Guaidó as President of the National Assembly over a year ago.
> Clearly no agenda here. Twitter backing an illegitimate US backed tin pot dictator and denying the legitmately elected government a voice.
As far as I can tell, the group you're calling the "legitimately elected government" is that of the tin pot dictator that's run Venezuela into the ground and ran a sham election to cement its power:
> Maduro’s allies swept legislative elections last month boycotted by the opposition and denounced as a sham by the U.S., the European Union and several other foreign governments. While the vote was marred by anemically low turnout, it nonetheless seemed to relegate into irrelevancy the U.S.-backed opposition led by lawmaker Juan Guaidó.
The government there bribes voters with food handouts. Think of how bad things must be if you can be bribed with food:
> The government may now be in control of the National Assembly but the low turnout was hardly a "win".
> Sure, there were people who cast their vote, some still clinging to the man in power, others citing their democratic right as well as many more fearful of repercussions like losing food handouts if they didn't.
> But for the most part, there's an atmosphere of resignation. Most Venezuelans I've spoken to this past week saw little point in these elections and decided there were better things to be doing on Sunday.
> The vast queues at petrol stations rather than the polling stations explain what you need to know about politics here - that Venezuelans just want to survive another day and for politics to just go away.
automated suspensions due to reports, which can be appealed
irrevocable suspensions at the discretion of twitter staff
I suspect this is the former. If an account gets enough reports, twitter's algos will automatically suspend it. The account owner then has the option to appeal it.
I agree with other answers here, but as a pushback, maybe it's not Twitter but rather the press and spotlight on it? There was an obvious "bump" after the insurrection, but I wonder if it reverted to it's mean and now we're just focused on that metric as we weren't before.
Imagine a curve. On the x-axis is amount of censorship. On the y-axis is opposition. A slippery slope corresponds to a flat part of the curve, where a large increase in censorship causes a small increase in opposition.
Any policy in the middle of the slippery-slope is not stable. Political alliances are easiest to form advocating either side of it.
In this case there are few people who want Trump banned but think banning Venezuela's National Assembly is a step too far.
> Twitter just suspended the account of Venezuela's new National Assembly, which was voted on in an election in December
There was no legitimate election. The Lima Group (practically every country in America - North and South), the EU, and indeed the UN say it's not legitimate. Some random person on twitter says it is.
Twitter has been banning Maduro backed accounts for years, to try to link this into the recent fair and transparent US elections and the removal of ex-president Trump from twitter is desparate
Readit News
The ideal scenario would be for people to use the web as how it was originally intended: ie, everyone having custom websites (and private emails) hosted on a VPS with an RSS feed so that your friends can follow your "feed". That way you'd own your content and wouldn't have to worry about censorships/account bans etc.
Discover-ability is just about the only downside with this.
That should not be.
But it is a freedom of speech issue because Twitter is a monopoly/gatekeeper. That's what needs fixing.
Regrading credit card processors, I don't see why it'd be necessary for a personal website. If it's about accepting donations, one could accept cryptocurrency.
Why would any other country use it now?
No doubt this will lead to countries leaving Twitter and making their own. Indeed at least Germany, France[1] and Mexico[2] realize the problem.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-11/merkel-se...
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-mexico/mexic...
For the same reason people were using it before. Everyone is on Twitter. A much, much smaller fraction are on Twitter-alternatives.
That said, I wish them the best of luck, as I hope alternatives are able to succeed in the near future.
The point is that a lot of media people is, and posting there gets you exposure. But as this group of people is much smaller than your proverbial "everyone", moving them off Twitter is a much easier affair.
I have often thought about what would happen if a small number of very high profile Twitter users with a wide reach to various different groups decided to set up their own servers (Mastodon perhaps) and asked their followers to go there. How many such high-profile users would you need before Twitter's momentum completely stops? I argue that that number is very small.
You’re really not making the point you think you are making.
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But i guess, private company and all that, doesn't matter if what they're doing aligns completely with US military interests or so the argument goes.
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As far as I can tell, the group you're calling the "legitimately elected government" is that of the tin pot dictator that's run Venezuela into the ground and ran a sham election to cement its power:
https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-congress-socialists-con...:
> Maduro’s allies swept legislative elections last month boycotted by the opposition and denounced as a sham by the U.S., the European Union and several other foreign governments. While the vote was marred by anemically low turnout, it nonetheless seemed to relegate into irrelevancy the U.S.-backed opposition led by lawmaker Juan Guaidó.
The government there bribes voters with food handouts. Think of how bad things must be if you can be bribed with food:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-55211149:
> The government may now be in control of the National Assembly but the low turnout was hardly a "win".
> Sure, there were people who cast their vote, some still clinging to the man in power, others citing their democratic right as well as many more fearful of repercussions like losing food handouts if they didn't.
> But for the most part, there's an atmosphere of resignation. Most Venezuelans I've spoken to this past week saw little point in these elections and decided there were better things to be doing on Sunday.
> The vast queues at petrol stations rather than the polling stations explain what you need to know about politics here - that Venezuelans just want to survive another day and for politics to just go away.
If there are food or petrol shortages in Venezuela, it's due to American economic warfare, not Maduro.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/juan-guidos-latest-coup-attemp...
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/11/21249203/venezuela-coup-jordan...
automated suspensions due to reports, which can be appealed
irrevocable suspensions at the discretion of twitter staff
I suspect this is the former. If an account gets enough reports, twitter's algos will automatically suspend it. The account owner then has the option to appeal it.
A medium where you can't communicate with your (political) adversaries has greatly reduced value even less relevance.
It's also kind of boring.
I think that is how it could be interpreted by someone that only knows Habbo for that.
They went as far as completely disabling the ability to chat for a week.
Any policy in the middle of the slippery-slope is not stable. Political alliances are easiest to form advocating either side of it.
In this case there are few people who want Trump banned but think banning Venezuela's National Assembly is a step too far.
There was no legitimate election. The Lima Group (practically every country in America - North and South), the EU, and indeed the UN say it's not legitimate. Some random person on twitter says it is.
Twitter has been banning Maduro backed accounts for years, to try to link this into the recent fair and transparent US elections and the removal of ex-president Trump from twitter is desparate