“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

Yes, insurrectionists typically see their actions as justified, and will frame them as such. What happened was an insurrection though, and the 1/6 committee and DOJ have done much to prove that.

> Lets not forget Hillary Clinton has always held Trump stole the election

She’s free to feel however she wants. But note she didn’t go to Twitter to foment insurrection.

> she even reiterated a few days ago the republicans are planning to do it again

Probably a safe bet, given Trump hasn’t even given up trying to steal the 2020 election.

In a free society everyone should be for the protection of free speech. Note that this does not mean unmitigated slinging of fecal matter. It does, however, mean that platforms with significant reach should not be engaged in explicitly favoring one side or another. They need to enabled open and "color blind" discussion. And, yes, while moderation is necessary even in places like HN, it cannot, should not, be ideological. That's how you end-up with China, North Korea, Iran, etc.

Cue arguments about the first amendment only being applicable to government. That isn't what this is about. At all.

Imagine an extreme case where all social media outlets, news stations, newspapers and even universities are controlled by, say, the Chinese Communist Party or some other extreme. Yes, a crazy out-there hypothetical. Sometimes exaggeration is able to lend clarity that is hard to convey in other ways.

Well, that's the kind of thing we have had for years now. Don't believe me? Kindly present a list of right wing, left wing and independents who have been banned from places like Twitter and Facebook. One side of that list will be almost empty. And that, precisely, is the problem Elon wants to solve. He isn't interested in tilting it in the opposite direction. He wants that list, when it comes to Twitter, to be equitable and, more than likely, as small as absolutely necessary.

What is wrong with that? Why the hatred?

> Misinformation spreads insanely fast on WhatsApp, even after limiting Group thread size and # of forwards.

That's true, but it's relatively easier to solve: really viral messages are a minuscule minority, and can set off internal alerts and be reviewed by humans; to prevent hysteria and murderous rhetoric.

And the problem also existed with word-of-mouth, centuries ago, before the masses ever startied reading "the press"; rumors could spread across entire nations. Fake stuff will spread, and people will become more skeptical and adapt, as they did before. Skin in the Game makes a related point.¹

The whole problem with censoring "disinformation" is that it removes society's self-healing mechanisms. Public discourse has always been messy. Louis Farrakhan is labelled hateful, but he ran the Million Man March and is credited getting many African-American men to register to vote. Malcolm X would have been considered an extremist and banned. But it would have been wrong; he may have been flawed on the micro level (that's subjective), but he was beneficial and heroic on the macro level. Censorship has huge second order effects, including self-censorship, introducing status-quo bias. It also promotes conspiratorial thinking, since people who think information is being hidden from them are more likely to seek fringe sources.

How do you censor real disinformation, without ending up with things like the Hunter Biden story being censored too? It also allows governments to lie with impunity, because accusations that the government is lying are treated as disinformation, while actual government lies (like the intel agency staffers who said the Hunter laptop was a Russian psyop) are spread everywhere.² People need to be able to spread "conspiracies", since while they may be factually incorrect, they may be directionally correct, while the "official" narrative may be total BS. Note I couldn't care less about Hunter or his laptop, but it's a clear recent example.

¹ https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa...

² https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-the-media-and-cia-lab...