There's no way they can ban him for saying that yet still claim to enforce the rules equally for all political affiliations.
There have been thousands (maybe more) tweets by people with blue verification checkmarks calling Trump an orange oompa loopa and much worse. No one has been banned for that (rightfully so imo).
There's been a ton of pressure on Twitter to ban Jones but using this tweet as an excuse shows they are in no way politically neutral.
This comes one day after Dorsey stood in front of congress and said they don't have a political agenda and previous examples of right wing censorship were "a mistake".
Ironically, one of the only places you can see actual footage of Dorsey saying this is on Infowars:
There's no way they can ban him for saying that yet still claim to enforce the rules equally for all political affiliations.
It's not the government, they absolutely can ban people for anything they want and they don't have to be consistent about it. There's nothing you can do about this it than deleting your account, complaining about them on the internet, and/or acquiring a seat on their board of directors and effecting change from within. I suppose a hostile takeover of the entire company should be mentioned, too.
Furthermore, "neutrality" is a figment of your imagination.
This seems to be a common trope lately. The claim seems to be that because censorship by private parties is not banned by the constitution, it is therefore a good idea.
It is entirely fair to criticize private parties for censorship even though there may be no legal recourse. It is in turn almost never a good idea to demand the censorship of ideas you don't like.
That's because it has only become self-evident lately. It has become much harder to believe that reason and truth will prevail on the internet. Back in the 1990s, it was easier to be idealistic.
Sure Twitter and other tech platforms are well within their rights to act in an explicitly partisan manner, but their reputations will suffer and the government will be even more keen on breaking them up and putting them on a tight regulatory leash.
They didn't ban him for saying only that.
Here's a part of their official statement on the matter.
>Today, we permanently suspended @realalexjones and @infowars from Twitter and Periscope. We took this action based on new reports of Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy, in addition to the accounts’ past violations.
The problem I have is how subjective all of this is, and while they say they are trying to increase transparency I don't see it.
This action suggests they keep tabs on accounts and there's some threshold they can reach over a period of time that will flip a ban on even if the actual action that causes the ban wouldn't be bannable in isolation.
I've not seen this policy discussed around any of their other bans.
The timing is also very suspicious as all the other big social media platforms banned Jones recently. That suggests that there's some level of coordination and/or Twitter is caving to outside pressure and not actually acting on their own internal policy in a consistent manner.
They have rules. Before they were enforced randomly.
Was that fovoritism? Who was at the button for that particular complaint? Who knows!
It doesn’t really matter what their rules or definitions of the terms they use are. Or how subjective people claim they are.
People will choose to use the service or not based on what they see happening.
But for the past few years, it want a question of what the terms meant exactly. People could say things that were blatant violations under the most charitable readings of the rules and nothing would happen.
Or it would.
Or they would show that someone else said thing X the rules forbid and the complainer would get banned and person who actually said it would be fine.
Now we may get some consistency (I’m not holding my breath though). That can only be a good thing.
I agree with everything you've said except for the second to the last sentence :)
This looks like just another arbitrary (and possibly politically motivated) ban to me. If they start removing other accounts of their "friends" who engage in behavior such as commenting on other's appearance, then I'd say we're starting to see consistency.
That hasn't happened yet though, and banning Jones for such a mild tweet seems to suggest it's unlikely we'll see the same scrutiny applied to others as many people would get kicked off the platform for this level of vitriol.
No it doesn't. Twitter has a reporting function and whenever content offends a bunch of people then a wave of reports is a predictable outcome. Keeping a record of previous actions on an account is not the same as monitoring it.
> There have been thousands (maybe more) tweets by people with blue verification checkmarks calling Trump an orange oompa loopa and much worse. No one has been banned for that (rightfully so imo).
Maybe because those kinds of tweets about Trump aren't anti-Semitic.
There's no way they can ban him for saying that yet still claim to enforce the rules equally for all political affiliations.
There have been thousands (maybe more) tweets by people with blue verification checkmarks calling Trump an orange oompa loopa and much worse. No one has been banned for that (rightfully so imo).
There's been a ton of pressure on Twitter to ban Jones but using this tweet as an excuse shows they are in no way politically neutral.
This comes one day after Dorsey stood in front of congress and said they don't have a political agenda and previous examples of right wing censorship were "a mistake".
Ironically, one of the only places you can see actual footage of Dorsey saying this is on Infowars:
https://www.infowars.com/watch-rep-markwayne-mullin-reads-sa...
This is not an Infowars endorsement, it's seriously the only place I can find this video aside from Breitbart.