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Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

patriotone.substack.com

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Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#201

Post by jcranmer »

adam_arthur wrote: post #60
pixelgeek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter isn't a public space. It is a privately owned platform.

I'm pretty confident that if a suitable case made it to the supreme court, social media like Twitter would be deemed a de facto public square under the US Constitution. Hopefully then people would apply a little more critical thought, rather than just parroting private vs public. It's clear that at a certain scale, a private space becomes de facto public one, similar to anti-trust legislation breaking up perfectly va…

Thomas might write that in a dissent (in fact, he already has). But he won't find a lot of allies on SCOTUS.

However, the key distinction between limited public forums and private forums is that the government creates the former. Twitter is private, and it has constitutionally-protected freedom of association to choose who it can associate with and constitutionally-protected freedom from being compelled to speak certain viewpoints. Any government that attempts to require social media to let everybody speak will find itself facing a constitutional challenge, as such a law is laughably unconstitutional. (Indeed, Texas and Florida have already written such laws, and they've already been enjoined for the very same reasons).

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#202

Post by adam_arthur »

pixelgeek wrote: post #143
adam_arthur wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty confident that if a suitable case made it to the supreme court, social media like Twitter would be deemed a de facto public square under the US Constitution. Hopefully then people would apply a little more critical thought, rather than just parroting private vs public. It's clear that at a certain scale, a private space becomes de facto public one, similar to anti-trust legislation breaking up perfectly va…

> I'm pretty confident that if a suitable case made it to the supreme court, social media like Twitter would be deemed a de facto public square under the US Constitution. Any case law to that effect?

My point is that most case law was ruled on when businesses were an order of magnitude smaller, and had smaller impact on the individual.

Sometimes difference in scale is also difference in kind.

A lot of prior case law that involved much smaller private entities would be unlikely to hold if retested at current scale, against e.g. Facebook or Twitter.

Even if the mechanism isn't through the constitution, Congress is likely to enact similar protections through new laws sooner or later.

The new era of big tech harkens back to the company store/company scrip days, which are widely deemed to have been monopolistic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#203

Post by Natsu »

danlugo92 wrote: post #157
pixelgeek wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Surely Nazis censored some media/newspapers before they were able to come up with the camps.

The Nazis had a paramilitary group called the Brownshirts (Sturmabteilung) who would go around physically assaulting anyone saying things they didn't like. Popper's paradox of tolerance invoked the right of self defense against those like them who would with "fists or pistols" silence others. Stuff like this is why the first amendment protects the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#205

Post by thrower123 »

balbaugh wrote: post #7

There is a Substack associated with the suspended twitter account [0]. They have made a recent post about the suspension of said account and all of the users other twitter accounts [1]. It states that twitter told the user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information". [0] https://patriotone.substack.com [1] https://patriotone.substack.com/p/twitter-suspension

There's a whole wave of real accounts that have been swept up in a couple of ban-waves in the past week, falsely accused of being bots.

Seems like they are doing network-based targeting, because none of them had tweeted anything particularly offensive.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#206

Post by oh_sigh »

balbaugh wrote: post #7

There is a Substack associated with the suspended twitter account [0]. They have made a recent post about the suspension of said account and all of the users other twitter accounts [1]. It states that twitter told the user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information". [0] https://patriotone.substack.com [1] https://patriotone.substack.com/p/twitter-suspension

How can you trust someone who says "There was not outside amplification"? How would the controller of the twitter account differentiate between simple virality and outside amplification? Of course, it's lame that Amy can buy a bunch of bots to get Bob's account canceled.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#207

Post by mynameismonkey »

zaph0d_ wrote: post #189

I am not sure if they are aware of the Fediverse [1,2]. The Fediverse essentially rebuilds all the social-networking services but as federated services. This means each service can be hosted by multiple instances and instances can communicate with one another, but all still have their internal rules. I think they even used the "-verse" term before the whole Metaverse-hype. They could move the tracker to a suitable Ma…

>I am not sure if they are aware of the Fediverse

According to the account owner's substack, they are on Gab. So, sort of.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#208

Post by joshuamorton »

logicalmonster wrote: post #121
q1w2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what they meant was that they detected bot activity associated with the account.

There's multiple huge problems if Twitter takes this approach to rules enforcement even if they're genuinely trying to be honest and unbiased. 1) Every account on Twitter has "bot activity associated with this account": if for no other reason that random advertising bots retweet, follow, or like random people and posts to attempt to blend in as a genuine account and hide their true purpose. This reasoning gives Twitt…

You appear to be assuming that the entire team of people at twitter who work on these problems either haven't considered or aren't able to address these issues. While there often are challenges with moderation and rules enforcement, this kind of stuff is pretty easy to address.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#210

Post by qwertyuiop_ »

hxkandbe wrote: post #30

@dang can we update the link to this one please? At the moment people are just reacting to the headline and there doesn’t seem to be much substance to the debate due to this. https://patriotone.substack.com/p/twitter-suspension

"Just reacting" is questioning Twitter's motives to suspend an account for reporting court proceedings of the most scandalous case in recent US history which entangles everyone on the top political echelons, wall street, hollywood, academia and big tech. Sure go ahead supress the discussion here too.
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