Twitter allegedly deleting negative tweets about United Airlines incident

edit: To be fair, Beecher says that my tweet refers to tweets he sent out after the original tweet was deleted. Indeed, his screenshot shows a different timestamp for the original tweet. Not knowing him at all, I have no reason to accuse him of deliberately making this up. But burden of evidence is still on him, and hard to accept claims of random Tweet deleting when, as I write, #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos is a top trend (as it has been all morning), and we have much more definitive evidence that Twitter manually shuts down controversial trending hashtags.

On a sidenote, how is it possible for a user to have a screenshot of an old tweet unless they took it before it was deleted? Other than a caching issue, I thought all Twitter clients (especially the official one) removed tweets marked for deletion? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5955021/detect-tweet-dele...

You're really overestimating people's willingness to pay for a service that's already free and convenient. There's really no good comp for tens of millions of users switching from a free service to a paid service just to avoid ads/conspiracy theories.

Perhaps the federal government could find a budget every year to fund a website that provides exactly this, and that those managing it are not employees of the government.

Sure, the government might not be spying on every word I say, but if the only way for me to connect to the internet is through for-profit companies, who are obligated to spy on every word I say to maximize shareholder value, is there any practical difference from living in a surveillance state?

Sure, the government might not be able to send goons after me in my home or my friend's home, but if the only way to get between the two is a private transportation company that asks for the government's goons, is there any practical difference from living in a police state?

Sure, the government might not be able to control the media, but if the media has the freedom to campaign for whatever candidates they like and send their own leaders to work for the government, and non-compliant media is threatened with the inability to access stories that they need for profit, what is the difference from living in a place with state-controlled media?

I absolutely agree with the understanding that private companies can, and often should, do whatever they want. I am also the sort of person who will argue that Twitter or some Twitter-like service should be censoring violent viewpoints (I am pretty supportive of mastodon.social's Terms of Service, for instance). But that's rooted in the same belief: we need to actively make sure that our society is the society we want it to be. It's not enough to make sure that our government is the government we want it to be, and treat everything between the government and the common man as an uncontrollable inevitability.

Fighting for the government to give freedom to corporations to do whatever they wish is very different from fighting for freedom for people.

I have posted a new one. Let's see if it stays.