Elected officials shouldn't have to rely on Twitter or other social media platforms to communicate with their constituencies. This woman seems like a loon to me, but she's a loon with a democratic mandate. If social media is going to be the default communication medium, then perhaps it needs regulation to clarify its relationship with elected officials.
Interestingly, she only got personally banned. Throughout she has maintained a "official business" account, which didn't get used for conspiracy-peddling, which hasn't been banned.
> Ms. Greene’s official Congressional account, @RepMTG, remains active because tweets from that account did not violate the service’s rules.
Ironically enough the last tweet I saw from her was promoting the idea that people who move from blue states to red should have to wait for 2 years before they're allowed to vote. You can't see her tweets any more since she's been kicked off* but this story adequately summarizes them - I picked a conservative news outlet to avoid the possibility of unfavorable media bias.
* It's really stupid that Twitter makes old tweets invisible. First they're easily accessible by other means to technically savvy people via archive.org or whatever, so this just throws barriers in the way of the least technically educated. Second, it fosters paranoia and mistrust because conversations about the tweets begin to resemble rumors rather than fact.
They don't have to rely on Twitter. Politicians have office budgets which include money for sending out mailings to their constituents. Most politicians also have their own email lists to which they send out updates and run polls. There are plenty of venues outside of Twitter to contact constituents.
Twitter itself is under no more of an obligation to publish material from a politician than a newspaper is. Both are corporations that operate under obligations to their shareholders. If a politician really wants to publish something on Twitter, they can pay for promoted ads just like they can with a newspaper. Expecting social media platforms to promote their message for free is hopelessly naive and does not match how democracy has worked for centuries. Sure, newspapers have published political messages for free via editorials and stories, but they are not obligated to do so. Getting the message out has always required time from volunteers and/or money towards supporting the cause.
Newspaper can be sued. Twitter can't (section 230) because they are a platform that can't choose what to publish. But they now giving Congress the finger by acting like newspaper and still can't be sued. Essentially, new media are given protection while old media constrainted. I favor 230 removed or explicitly nullify if media show they can censor.
Television has been the default communication mechanism for many years, and as such is already regulated. I believe the problem with TV is that you cannot lie in political advertising, which is probably why MTG was not using that platform. This is an old and tired argument, dismissed long ago to avoid propaganda and public risks. MTG has not been banned from TV, she has all the Democratic access she needs.
> If social media is going to be the default communication medium
I don't think this is really true. Most people in the US don't use Twitter. Not to mention that many users are following entertainment based users or aren't fully consuming posts by those they follow.
Twitter is just an additional stream/supplement to town halls, email lists, websites, news coverage, etc.
Twitter use is near-ubiquitous among journalists, politicians, and those who wield or seek to gain influence. Corporations fire people, companies terminate business deals, and universities expel students based on what gets said on Twitter. News agencies find leads and shape stories using Twitter. Most of what gets said on CNN, NBC, or Fox News is filtered through the lens of writers who use Twitter and care about how Twitter will react. Political fortunes can swing on bad tweets. Most Americans may not use Twitter, but I would say most are still affected by it, whether they know it or not.
If social media is that important - and that isn't a decision anyone has actually voted on, it's just something people say now - then the government can build its own social media platform and regulate it as a utility. Having the government take over a private business because it decides the free speech rights of politicians should be more important than the free speech and association rights of everyone else is a bad idea.
This isn't like the FCC regulating the airwaves, the internet isn't a limited spectrum, and there's no reason to act as if the capacity to disseminate information over it is actually a scarce resource.
The only reason they use Twitter is because that is a direct way to the public, rather than through those pesky mainstream media who might decide not to air certain statements or write about them in their opinion columns right along the reporting.
It's simply an attempt at an end-run around the free press, that's why it is so popular with the extremists and that's why the extremists do their damnest to create their own 'safe space' for their horrifying little screeds.
So, traditionally, politicians communicated via press release, either personally or via a press office. Of course, this had the disadvantage that newspapers etc might just decline to publish obvious nonsense.
However, there’s presumably nothing stopping her from issuing this nonsense via press release, or on a blog, or similar.
I'd also say constituents shouldn't have to rely on for-profit (and in this case objectively harmful to society) advertising platforms in order to hear from elected officials or government. Where I am, Twitter seems to have become the default channel for many kinds of communication, and those of us who don't use it are excluded.
Every member of Congress is provided with their own website, a subdomain of either house.gov or senate.gov, for the entirety of their term. If your representative neglects that website and chooses to communicate through a private outlet instead, that's something to complain to your representative about.
I'm not sure if people here are old enough to remember but there was a time in the late 90s where everyone was telling you their AOL Keyword (commercials, tv shows, movie trailers, print media, et cetera).
Walled-garden social is sort of the same thing in a way.
What an absolute boon for Marjorie Taylor Greene. Twitter is not a place where useful, meaningful conversation happens in the political space (especially by people like MTG) but she’ll be able to dine out on this ban for a long time. I expect it’ll be featured in every fundraising email she sends until something changes.
She’s not meaningfully censored, just like Trump wasn’t: every press release he sends gets coverage, he still sends out emails to his millions of followers just fine.
It's hard to see this as a "boon" for Marjorie Taylor Green. If Twitter is such a useless platform, why was she busy using it to promote her ideas?
I absolutely agree that termination of her Twitter account is not meaningful censorship. I'm sure it won't be long before all the networks want to interview her about it. The invitations have probably already been sent.
Twitter is a place that is used by a lot of “journalists” or just people in the media. Participating there is going to get you coverage in other forms of media and free rent in the minds of people in media.
I don't think this is the same old tired argument.
Political groups are not a protected class in the United States, and for good reason. Political affiliation is not an inherent quality of a person. People's political affiliation can, and does, change.
Marjorie Taylor Green had her Twitter account terminated for breaching a written contract between her and Twitter. Her Twitter account was not terminated because she is a Republican, or because she's a woman, or because she's white, or because she's over 40, or because she's heterosexual.
During the civil rights movement, people were denied service because of the color of their skin. This didn't happen to Marjorie Taylor Green.
I’m not sure what she said, but given the amount of reversals and “facts-later-questioned” concerning this virus, I’d be interested to see if she ever would have it reinstated if she were right about the key points concerning her ban.
I don't think they're claiming she's wrong. They're claiming her post was "misleading", but misleading to what? Presumably misleading people to believe that a public policy is wrong or ineffective.
Since you are not posting your sources, it's hard to tell what claims of Marjorie Taylor Greene you are referring to. I recently stumbled upon a site that reports on covid data from Denmark. The rate of Omicron infection in both vaccinated and unvaccinated populations >15yo is the same. This corroborates with a recent DHH post surfacing similar Denmark data. There is a distinct uncomfortable possibility that the vaccines targeting a 2 year old variant are, indeed, ineffective as a measure to limit the spread of Omicron. Unfortunately, I can't corroborate with US data because CDC is obstinate in not publishing covid data with a breakdown by date/age/vaccination status/virus variant.
Based in prior variant data, it is likely the vaccines do work to prevent severe omicron cases. Feel free to clarify what is it that the vaccines work for, and which of Marjorie Taylor Greene tweets fell afoul of that.
PS. This post is in no way an endorsement of Marjorie Taylor Greene political activities, of which I know very little other than her being a Republican Congresswoman.
I'm 100% pro vaccine. I'd rather Twitter were destroyed for doing this than Greene were suspended. I'll happily deal with combating some misinformation, it's an opportunity that is critically important. People with anti vax beliefs don't magically stop existing just because you censor Greene; it hurts, it does not help to do that. Instead, more of them go underground, they vanish from the surface, you don't see them as much, but they're still around spreading those ideas. The notion that you can't have a debate over vaccines in the open air - eg Twitter threads, or comparable - between such sides is disgusting. What other point does Twitter serve then? An official public relations release platform for previously authorized statements and speech. And to let people know what you ate for lunch, its original glorious purpose.
Twitter should be a place where I can argue against Greene's vaccine statements when she Tweets them. She provides an excellent central point of focus to distribute correct information, a honeypot for delivering information that is right. (insert retort: yeah but that doesn't work, you can't convince people; cool, so shut it all down then, civilization is over, give up now; throw them in the gulag, that's where you have to go with that logic if you believe people are permanently beyond reason)
Okay, but do you think that a single person following her Twitter is going to say, “Wow, Twitter censored her because she was wrong”?
Of course not. They are going to be livid and more determined in their belief. Anyone defending vaccine should be angry at Twitter for making the situation worse.
Not sure they have to. Gjsman affirmed their right to freedom (they CAN), but would prefer that they exercised that freedom in a certain way (they SHOULD).
Believe it or not, government regulations don't have to be the solution to every little thing.
> Why should Twitter give up their right to freedom of expression and freedom of association?
The argument "I know they can but that does not mean they should" doesn't imply that when they don't do something they shouldn't do they lose the ability to do it... I shouldn't be a jerk, but I do believe I have the legal right to be a jerk, so I guess by your argument I need to be a jerk and I guess no one should even call me out for it? That doesn't make any sense: Twitter currently can do this stuff; and yet, despite that, they shouldn't.
When the decentralized web, for all intents and purposes died and was replaced by like 5-6 major platforms who largely collude to silence people or perspectives...all the "mah property" take on how this isn't a free speech case goes out the door.
The monopolistic cabal of Twitter, Facebook and Google changes how this should be seen.
Imho - you either break them up into a 100 companies, or you legally ban them from censorship.
In an ideal world, because they are now the public square effectively, they should be held to a different stricter standard. As well as other big tech companies (App Store, etc.)
Twitter is not a conscious being, and cannot experience the subjective feeling of being oppressed. I support maximal liberty for humans, and appropriate protection of those humans from corporations as well as the government. Corporations may be collections of people, but they're a lot more than that - which makes them not human - and in any case they are not loci of experience.
So you're saying no elected official should be bound by any laws, contracts or the terms of service of any organization, since doing so could be interpreted as "censorship?"
That if anyone else had said what Marjorie Taylor Greene had said, they would be subject to action by Twitter under its own stated policies, but the rules just shouldn't apply to her?
> they would be subject to action by Twitter under its own stated policies
When people say "hang the rich" on Twitter do you see them getting banned? Twitter specifically says they do not accept appeal to violence, but in reality they only censor the language they don't agree with.
This isn't about shutting her up. Its about Twitter coming out and saying that they agree that she's a loon. No one actually expects a member of Congress to be permanently shut up over something like this.
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When '@dang' comes around here and deletes posts, its about pushing the discussion in the direction they want for this website.
The _ONLY_ moderating action internet citizens have is moderation: deletion of posts, soft-banning, permanent bans, and the like. There's no other possible effect available for Twitter (or other social media) to come down on unruly users.
I’m not sure Streisand effect applies here. Anyone roughly aware of American politics knows MTG’s looniness. And Twitter has already banned DJT which was a bigger thing. This isn’t going to bring attention where there wasn’t any already.
Absurd. Of all platforms, Twitter is best positioned to assess how big the Streisand effect really is and measure whether the howls of outrage from her supporters are really louder than the low-level rumble of discontent from her opponents.
Streisand effect only helps them in this case. They don't care about the content of the message or changing minds. They care about the message being tied to twitter and the damage to their brand.
I don't think history has proved the Streisand Effect materializes here. When Twitter and others deplatformed Trump after January 6, his direct lines to his followers were dissolved. He had a subscription email or something that was a failure. I think he's trying to launch a social network soon. He has never managed to get as big of microphone as he had before.
Twitter has worldwide reach, so what if a citizen of another country is harmed due to misinformation posted by a US elected official? The citizens of that country didn't elect them.
She’s only elected to be a legislator in the House of Representatives. It’s not like she has a license to kill. That ought to have nothing to do with anything else, including her privileges on any random website.
Sometimes the right course of action doesn't fall neatly inside a simple set of rules or inside a binary "this is good, that is bad" narrative. Sometimes very similar circumstances need to be handled in very different ways because of subtle nuances in their contexts. This is why lawyers and philosophers will never be out of work and why we should all be wary of borrowing McPhilosophies from internet memes and Twitter hot-takes without putting in the effort and research to think through the issues for ourselves.
If you find yourself reacting to this news with too neat and tidy of a response, that is a good sign that you may need to spend some time trying to understand and empathize with alternative perspectives and that you may need to spend some time trying to understand why this is such a complicated (and consequential) issue for the United States government and Twitter to navigate.
No matter what their politics are, I would hope that all reasonable people can condemn cancel culture, regardless of the political alignment of the person being cancelled.
I get a lot of value from Twitter because I follow a few awesomely interesting people, but I could probably get the same effect by bookmarking their blogs.
People should have access to all information, and filter for themselves what is trash. I don’t want Twitter, news media, etc. filtering.
I have started to just pay attention to a small number of people: Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan, Matt Taibbi, and Noam Chomsky. That is a small sample size, but enough diversity for me.
I saw a recent meme that said "In the distant past we didn't have cancel culture, we had exile culture. You were just told to leave."
> People should have access to all information, and filter for themselves what is trash. I don’t want Twitter, news media, etc. filtering.
And people still do -- Marjorie can start a blog on a vps and I'm sure most providers would be reasonably okay with it, unless she became a DDoS target (possible).
If you are upset because the people that gave her that platform said "you are doing it wrong" this happens in the physical world too. If you show up to a sports arena (a place with a large group of people that are captive) and hang a sign in the stands with an "unacceptable" message, the arena will ask you to take it down or force you to.
Platforms have a brand, and they are filtering for their own brand reputation.
I hate that our web is more "centralized" but all of these actions are going to enable more decentralization to happen because of it.
Poor analogy. A sports arena is one big room for sport, not messaging. If people stood on soapboxes and yelled their off-topic ideas at everyone in the arena, they would be asked to leave regardless of what their messages were.
Twitter's purpose is publishing messages on any topic. It is not one big room where everyone must hear everyone else. The equivalent "doing it wrong" on Twitter is not (or shouldn't be) dissenting views or objections to vaccines. Doing it wrong on Twitter should be confined to inappropriate use of the API or some other technical misuse that actually impacts other users. Or posting illegal material or hate speech.
I don't remember anyone asking Big Tech companies to act as helicopter parents, protecting readers via censorship from ideas that don't align with current public policy.
From the 1940s on there was a Fairness Doctrine for companies with broadcast licenses. The Republicans killed this off in the 1980s, saying private business should be able to do what they want. Hoisted by their own petard.
Humans are a social species, and a lot of what you refer to as "cancel culture" is a reaction to antisocial behavior like racism and sexism and homophobia that actively harms our societies. Some of this behavior has been going on for centuries or longer. People who support so called "cancel culture" simply think that a few millennia of racism and sexism are enough.
Reasonable people should not condemn cancel culture; reasonable people should support efforts to cancel racism, sexism, ageism, and the other -isms that cause profound harm to members of our societies. It's not really that difficult to not make racist, sexist, or homophobic remarks.
I realize now that I have a different definition of “cancel culture” than you and some other people here, which is OK.
I was thinking of what Bill Mahr, on his HBO show, talks about as far as cancelling appearances at universities of people who were invited to talk, and then some subgroup protested that they didn’t like their opinions. I am also thinking of cancelling people whose political opinions vary, and also in this case an elected Congresswoman who has some very wrong ideas about the dangers of vaccinations.
I think that racist, etc. remarks are easier to filter and discard than political ideas. I feel comfortable using automated filters to discard racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks, but I am not comfortable discarding political speech.
Is it a manifestation of cancel culture to enforce platform rules (a "code of conduct", if you will)? You can argument that the rules are politically charged. Whether that's okay is determined by whether you think Twitter is a private or a public space.
If you define cancel culture as angry k pop fans attacking people they don't like, then yes it is probably bad. If you define it as a service banning effective private propoganda machines spewing baseless conspiracy theories to people who are seemingly unable or unwilling to acknowledge reality, then I'm definitely for it. I don't have a lot of faith in people to discern reality from fantasy anymore. If Twitter can stop people acting in bad faith from manipulating people, with real world consequences, then I think that's their obligation, regardless of political alignment. In this case the ban is because of spreading COVID vaccine misinformation. Countless lives could have been saved if this nonsense had never been given a platform.
This leads to 2 twitters, one for each side of the political aisle. Filter bubbles enabled by social media are already bad enough, a complete fracture of the public space along political lines is a distinctly dangerous idea.
I don’t disagree with you, I am just ruminating about making a personal decision to stop using Twitter. I did that years ago for Facebook (now, less than ten minutes a month in FB).
I am having some difficulty deciding whether I think the major Platforms should be public regulated services or the property of companies that can do anything they want to with their property. My opinion changes on this…
members of congress should not be using commercial social media as their exclusive form of pushing out status updates to the populace.
We have open standards (W3C recommendations) even, and these protocols can be adopted by the content management system used by House.Gov. Congress Critters need to become part of the Fedi.
This just pushes censorship down a level, as we found out with Parler and Gab. Remember when Gab used to use Mastodon, and the major app stores told the authors of Mastodon clients that unless they hardcoded a check to prevent their app from connecting to Gab, their apps would be banned?
that's fine. I'd prefer if official (public) business were conducted through public infrastructure through open protocols rather than via commercial walled-gardens.
They (being the House of Representatives) absolutely should own their namespace and operate under 'house.gov'.
Facebook and Twitter could even provide this service, as a commercially managed hosted endeavor (look at how Gmail is white-labeled as "Google Workspace" and sold as a service on a portable domain name).
Readit News
> Ms. Greene’s official Congressional account, @RepMTG, remains active because tweets from that account did not violate the service’s rules.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/29/rep-greene-suggests-a-national...
* It's really stupid that Twitter makes old tweets invisible. First they're easily accessible by other means to technically savvy people via archive.org or whatever, so this just throws barriers in the way of the least technically educated. Second, it fosters paranoia and mistrust because conversations about the tweets begin to resemble rumors rather than fact.
Twitter itself is under no more of an obligation to publish material from a politician than a newspaper is. Both are corporations that operate under obligations to their shareholders. If a politician really wants to publish something on Twitter, they can pay for promoted ads just like they can with a newspaper. Expecting social media platforms to promote their message for free is hopelessly naive and does not match how democracy has worked for centuries. Sure, newspapers have published political messages for free via editorials and stories, but they are not obligated to do so. Getting the message out has always required time from volunteers and/or money towards supporting the cause.
I don't think this is really true. Most people in the US don't use Twitter. Not to mention that many users are following entertainment based users or aren't fully consuming posts by those they follow.
Twitter is just an additional stream/supplement to town halls, email lists, websites, news coverage, etc.
It's funny when politicians with entire staff committed to disseminating information complain about censorship.
This isn't like the FCC regulating the airwaves, the internet isn't a limited spectrum, and there's no reason to act as if the capacity to disseminate information over it is actually a scarce resource.
It's simply an attempt at an end-run around the free press, that's why it is so popular with the extremists and that's why the extremists do their damnest to create their own 'safe space' for their horrifying little screeds.
However, there’s presumably nothing stopping her from issuing this nonsense via press release, or on a blog, or similar.
Walled-garden social is sort of the same thing in a way.
Deleted Comment
She’s not meaningfully censored, just like Trump wasn’t: every press release he sends gets coverage, he still sends out emails to his millions of followers just fine.
I absolutely agree that termination of her Twitter account is not meaningful censorship. I'm sure it won't be long before all the networks want to interview her about it. The invitations have probably already been sent.
- Censorship bad, the state should regulate social media to not censor
- It's a private company, they can do whatever they want
Used however it fits by either political side.
Are we better than this?
Society banned private companies denying services in law to promote a better and acceptable society.
Sadly, just to re-implement it again under the same old tired argument, it's a private company...
It's not fooling anyone who is being honest, this is just banning people you don't like.
Political group is the new religious group, banning the groups you don't like shouldn't be acceptable in modern society.
Political groups are not a protected class in the United States, and for good reason. Political affiliation is not an inherent quality of a person. People's political affiliation can, and does, change.
Marjorie Taylor Green had her Twitter account terminated for breaching a written contract between her and Twitter. Her Twitter account was not terminated because she is a Republican, or because she's a woman, or because she's white, or because she's over 40, or because she's heterosexual.
During the civil rights movement, people were denied service because of the color of their skin. This didn't happen to Marjorie Taylor Green.
Now, scientists consider it unlikely, but now you are allowed to discuss it.
Based in prior variant data, it is likely the vaccines do work to prevent severe omicron cases. Feel free to clarify what is it that the vaccines work for, and which of Marjorie Taylor Greene tweets fell afoul of that.
PS. This post is in no way an endorsement of Marjorie Taylor Greene political activities, of which I know very little other than her being a Republican Congresswoman.
https://covid19danmark.dk/#gennembrudsinfektioner
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765351
https://world.hey.com/dhh/should-you-vaccinate-your-kids-169...
Twitter should be a place where I can argue against Greene's vaccine statements when she Tweets them. She provides an excellent central point of focus to distribute correct information, a honeypot for delivering information that is right. (insert retort: yeah but that doesn't work, you can't convince people; cool, so shut it all down then, civilization is over, give up now; throw them in the gulag, that's where you have to go with that logic if you believe people are permanently beyond reason)
Of course not. They are going to be livid and more determined in their belief. Anyone defending vaccine should be angry at Twitter for making the situation worse.
And yes, I know they can but that does not mean they should.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
Believe it or not, government regulations don't have to be the solution to every little thing.
See saurik's comment below for more.
The argument "I know they can but that does not mean they should" doesn't imply that when they don't do something they shouldn't do they lose the ability to do it... I shouldn't be a jerk, but I do believe I have the legal right to be a jerk, so I guess by your argument I need to be a jerk and I guess no one should even call me out for it? That doesn't make any sense: Twitter currently can do this stuff; and yet, despite that, they shouldn't.
The monopolistic cabal of Twitter, Facebook and Google changes how this should be seen.
Imho - you either break them up into a 100 companies, or you legally ban them from censorship.
Twitter should not censor anybody off their platform when the courts consider them a public forum, let alone elected officials.
That if anyone else had said what Marjorie Taylor Greene had said, they would be subject to action by Twitter under its own stated policies, but the rules just shouldn't apply to her?
When people say "hang the rich" on Twitter do you see them getting banned? Twitter specifically says they do not accept appeal to violence, but in reality they only censor the language they don't agree with.
Last I remember Maxine Waters was calling for public harassment without consequence.
It's the same reason why we care about murder of an elected official more than a murder of any other person.
This won’t change minds. This will only harden viewpoints and invite political and regulatory scrutiny.
She is a Congressional Representative.
This isn't about shutting her up. Its about Twitter coming out and saying that they agree that she's a loon. No one actually expects a member of Congress to be permanently shut up over something like this.
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When '@dang' comes around here and deletes posts, its about pushing the discussion in the direction they want for this website.
The _ONLY_ moderating action internet citizens have is moderation: deletion of posts, soft-banning, permanent bans, and the like. There's no other possible effect available for Twitter (or other social media) to come down on unruly users.
Let her go elsewhere
Dead Comment
If you find yourself reacting to this news with too neat and tidy of a response, that is a good sign that you may need to spend some time trying to understand and empathize with alternative perspectives and that you may need to spend some time trying to understand why this is such a complicated (and consequential) issue for the United States government and Twitter to navigate.
I get a lot of value from Twitter because I follow a few awesomely interesting people, but I could probably get the same effect by bookmarking their blogs.
People should have access to all information, and filter for themselves what is trash. I don’t want Twitter, news media, etc. filtering.
I have started to just pay attention to a small number of people: Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan, Matt Taibbi, and Noam Chomsky. That is a small sample size, but enough diversity for me.
> People should have access to all information, and filter for themselves what is trash. I don’t want Twitter, news media, etc. filtering.
And people still do -- Marjorie can start a blog on a vps and I'm sure most providers would be reasonably okay with it, unless she became a DDoS target (possible).
If you are upset because the people that gave her that platform said "you are doing it wrong" this happens in the physical world too. If you show up to a sports arena (a place with a large group of people that are captive) and hang a sign in the stands with an "unacceptable" message, the arena will ask you to take it down or force you to.
Platforms have a brand, and they are filtering for their own brand reputation.
I hate that our web is more "centralized" but all of these actions are going to enable more decentralization to happen because of it.
Poor analogy. A sports arena is one big room for sport, not messaging. If people stood on soapboxes and yelled their off-topic ideas at everyone in the arena, they would be asked to leave regardless of what their messages were.
Twitter's purpose is publishing messages on any topic. It is not one big room where everyone must hear everyone else. The equivalent "doing it wrong" on Twitter is not (or shouldn't be) dissenting views or objections to vaccines. Doing it wrong on Twitter should be confined to inappropriate use of the API or some other technical misuse that actually impacts other users. Or posting illegal material or hate speech.
I don't remember anyone asking Big Tech companies to act as helicopter parents, protecting readers via censorship from ideas that don't align with current public policy.
Reasonable people should not condemn cancel culture; reasonable people should support efforts to cancel racism, sexism, ageism, and the other -isms that cause profound harm to members of our societies. It's not really that difficult to not make racist, sexist, or homophobic remarks.
I was thinking of what Bill Mahr, on his HBO show, talks about as far as cancelling appearances at universities of people who were invited to talk, and then some subgroup protested that they didn’t like their opinions. I am also thinking of cancelling people whose political opinions vary, and also in this case an elected Congresswoman who has some very wrong ideas about the dangers of vaccinations.
I think that racist, etc. remarks are easier to filter and discard than political ideas. I feel comfortable using automated filters to discard racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks, but I am not comfortable discarding political speech.
edit: one of two accounts. Her personal account, not her official account.
I am having some difficulty deciding whether I think the major Platforms should be public regulated services or the property of companies that can do anything they want to with their property. My opinion changes on this…
We have open standards (W3C recommendations) even, and these protocols can be adopted by the content management system used by House.Gov. Congress Critters need to become part of the Fedi.
They (being the House of Representatives) absolutely should own their namespace and operate under 'house.gov'.
Facebook and Twitter could even provide this service, as a commercially managed hosted endeavor (look at how Gmail is white-labeled as "Google Workspace" and sold as a service on a portable domain name).