It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

Of course it doesn't? Who cares. I deleted my account too but that doesn't mean much.

I'm highly skeptical this outrage cycle will go on for long enough to seriously impact their userbase. Absent a proper competitor to Twitter. I've been part of enough internet boycotts of them to be cynical about their odds.

Also I'm not sure why you're having trouble finding Facebook data... just google it if you care so much about dismissing their obvious dominance. And WSJ paywall is easily bypassable.

Fixing traffic or social media is a whole different level.

It's like fixing full autonomous driving. Still didn't happen and he is fixing it quite some time.

Social media is even harder.

> Trump provided a lot of engagement and popularity to the platform, so banning him was igealogy-driven and was very much against their business interests.

You either have those engagement numbers or you don't. Which is it?

You either know how much advertising revenue he generated -or- how much he drove away. Or you don't.

You either have evidence that banning him was against their business interests or you are just guessing. I don't think you have those numbers. You suggested Elon Musk might have those numbers. So it's pretty clear you yourself don't have the internal business numbers that would be used to make those decisions.

Lacking sources to back up your claims, then you were arguing in bad faith. But I'm open minded. Feel free to back up that claim with actual evidence.

You do not have a source. Guilt by association is not a source. You're just making a guess and you should be called out for claiming a guess is an actual source.

> If someone is banned from the site, the site is not accessible to that person.

Sure, by definition you can't access a site you are banned from. But that's not what accessibility is and that is not what the accessibility department was working on.

> If people are being banned for political speech, then it certainly violates any form of platform neutrality.

Yes it does violate any form of platform neutrality. That still has nothing to do with the actual definition of what accessibility includes.

> Banning someone for exercising their free speech is anti-accessibility.

That's absurd. Accessibility already has a definition and it's quite specific: it's about disabled people. You are free to re-define words, but folks are also free to ignore your personal definitions.

> Freedom of Speech is a human right which Twitter has been willfully violating.

I don't agree with you that they have been violating anyone's free speech but what does this have to do with your original claim that "the accessibility team acted as political speech commissars"?

Where is your actual evidence of the accessibility team doing that? Actual evidence would not include your guesses or guilt by association.

To illustrate with an example, I follow Paul Massaro https://twitter.com/apmassaro3 because of his expertise and because he gave me advice when I needed it the most. He is, to put it mildly, a target for nation state actors,

> Paul Massaro is the senior policy advisor for counter-corruption and sanctions. Paul’s work has advanced the recognition of corruption as a national security threat. He has been described in the media as “one of America’s foremost corruption experts” and an “endless source of democratic ingenuity." His work has been similarly described as "breathtakingly prescient.” He has worked on over 13 pieces of counter-corruption legislation and facilitated the founding of the Congressional Caucus against Foreign Corruption and Kleptocracy and the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance against Kleptocracy. Paul also covers German-speaking Europe and East Asia.

> His work on the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act, a landmark law redefining doping as fraud and making it illegal in international competitions anywhere in the world, has for the first time provided justice to clean athletes and held to account the authoritarian actors who use sport as a tool of foreign policy. The Associated Press described the unanimous passage of the act as “a remarkable achievement considering the polarization in U.S. politics.” His work on the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention (TRAP) Act was similarly groundbreaking, serving as the first-ever U.S. law to respond to abuse of INTERPOL by authoritarian regimes.

https://www.csce.gov/about-csce/staff/paul-massaro-iii-polic...

He deals with sanctions and he is one of the people deeply involved in the Russian sanctions when they invaded Ukraine, https://www.csce.gov/international-impact/press-and-media/pr...

I am sure there are people who'd prefer that he was discredited, his work hampered, or just to hurt him a bit for the amount of money he's taken out of their coffers.

He is a cog in the machine, but he is one of the more important cogs in the machine. That makes him a target.

He is also an avid social media user and interacts with people on Twitter. A lot. He uses the site prolifically and has 300k+ followers due to his expertise.

If anyone could buy that badge, and millions would have to for Twitter to service the LBO's debt, then it becomes trivially easy for nation state actors to eventually create a fake, or several fake, Paul Massaros, and knowing which one is the real Paul would get harder. ("just check the username" doesn't quite work with the general public)

It would become easier to manufacture a scandal that could be used against him & the US in general.

The kicker is that he's not even remotely the most important person on Twitter. The site has a heavy chunk of the American leadership regularly interacting with people and each other online, and they're all targets that could be used by clever propagandists.

The badge used to help mitigate it. I know if I'm talking to a Paul Massaro with a badge, then it's the real Paul. That becomes impossible without it.

This is a terrible idea.