Elected officials shouldn't have to rely on Twitter or other social media platforms to communicate with their constituencies. This woman seems like a loon to me, but she's a loon with a democratic mandate. If social media is going to be the default communication medium, then perhaps it needs regulation to clarify its relationship with elected officials.
What an absolute boon for Marjorie Taylor Greene. Twitter is not a place where useful, meaningful conversation happens in the political space (<i>especially</i> by people like MTG) but she’ll be able to dine out on this ban for a long time. I expect it’ll be featured in every fundraising email she sends until something changes.<p>She’s not meaningfully censored, just like Trump wasn’t: every press release he sends gets coverage, he still sends out emails to his millions of followers just fine.
Ah, let's get out the two wonderful arguments:<p>- Censorship bad, the state should regulate social media to not censor<p>- It's a private company, they can do whatever they want<p>Used however it fits by either political side.<p>Are we better than this?
I’m not sure what she said, but given the amount of reversals and “facts-later-questioned” concerning this virus, I’d be interested to see if she ever would have it reinstated if she were right about the key points concerning her ban.
I don’t care what she said, it is not the job of private businesses to censor elected officials.<p>And yes, I know they <i>can</i> but that does not mean they <i>should</i>.
Sometimes the right course of action doesn't fall neatly inside a simple set of rules or inside a binary "this is good, that is bad" narrative. Sometimes very similar circumstances need to be handled in very different ways because of subtle nuances in their contexts. This is why lawyers and philosophers will never be out of work and why we should all be wary of borrowing McPhilosophies from internet memes and Twitter hot-takes without putting in the effort and research to think through the issues for ourselves.<p>If you find yourself reacting to this news with too neat and tidy of a response, that is a good sign that you may need to spend some time trying to understand and empathize with alternative perspectives and that you may need to spend some time trying to understand why this is such a complicated (and consequential) issue for the United States government and Twitter to navigate.
No matter what their politics are, I would hope that all reasonable people can condemn cancel culture, regardless of the political alignment of the person being cancelled.<p>I get a lot of value from Twitter because I follow a few awesomely interesting people, but I could probably get the same effect by bookmarking their blogs.<p>People should have access to all information, and filter for themselves what is trash. I don’t want Twitter, news media, etc. filtering.<p>I have started to just pay attention to a small number of people: Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan, Matt Taibbi, and Noam Chomsky. That is a small sample size, but enough diversity for me.
members of congress should not be using commercial social media as their exclusive form of pushing out status updates to the populace.<p>We have open standards (W3C recommendations) even, and these protocols can be adopted by the content management system used by House.Gov. Congress Critters need to become part of the Fedi.
The post that got her suspended claimed “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” per the NYT article. I was unable to find a screenshot of the original tweet, seems to have been deleted.<p>A cursory look at the raw VAERS data from the CDC[1] shows:<p><i>Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem. (...) During this time, VAERS received 10,688 reports of death (0.0022%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. CDC and FDA clinicians review reports of death to VAERS including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records.</i><p>In contrast, the CDC[2] estimates that 817k people have died of Covid-19 in the US which puts the mortality at 248 deaths per 100k individuals. Currently, an unvaccinated individual has 20x the risk of dying from Covid-19 than someone with a booster.<p>I am no first amendment scholar, but spreading lies that increase people rate of mortality by 20x seems pretty close to the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception to protected speech. That puts aside the fact that Twitter is a private platform, thus first amendment laws do not apply.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm</a>
Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to have any kind of discourse on a topic like this because people's opinions are too diluted.<p>When Twitter does an action like this, or any other media platform, it is rarely done by a single person on a whim. It is a collective decision by a number - 2, 3 or maybe more - of people.<p>The crazy part that this decision is solely one-sided. Twitter doesn't care if this person is right or wrong, their understanding is that this person is spreading misinformation and that's it. And in a case like this, it is most certainly amplified by the stature of the person in question.<p>Who says the information is right or wrong? Well, I'd bet that it is also a collective of people. In this case, it is probably scientists and health professionals. Who, of course, in due course could also be found out to have been wrong.<p>But, Twitter is clearly omni-sentient and can see that their decision is the right one.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but if a company suspends a member of the government who has a budget and staff for PR as a function of serving as a member of that government, then that person has not in any meaningful way been censored by the government. This is not the poster case for trying to prove tech has too much power. There's a long list of marginalized people suspended for no good reason who don't get to whine about it on C-SPAN or through their press office.
What goes around will come around. The existence of Twitter as a relevant private company is now limited to 2-4 years, the amount of time the next GOP takes total control of government.
> Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She included a misleading chart that pulled data from a government database of unverified raw data.<p>Does anyone have a link to the tweet in question? It's interesting that it was labeled the chart as "misleading" as opposed to based on doctored data. It appears being factual is not enough and you could "mislead" depending on how you present it. But "mislead" from what precisely? A policy decision? It relates to the whole shift from "disinformation" to "misinformation", which has a much broader scope.<p>Either way, I always feel a little weird about a private corporation censoring a democratically elected politician, especially when concerning political speech. I get that its their platform, but its not without political influence. The white house has admitted to be in close contact with all the large social media companies regarding what is 'misinformation', going so far as to flag posts [0]. There's definitely a risk of political interference<p>[0] <a href="https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-would-government-censorship" rel="nofollow">https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-would-government-ce...</a>
We kicked out a bunch of traitors from Congress during the Civil War era, so banning a person from twitter who is actively trying to foster a Civil War by promoting lies and misinformation seems pretty mild.<p>Banning her or anyone like her who spreads lies is perfectly within Twitter's terms of service. The issues is doing it consistently.<p>I can't tell you how many times I have reported lies about elections and Covid on twitter and almost always it's "We found nothing wrong with this".
One thing I don't like about the New York Times is that they obscure the actual information to force you to rely on their presentation. Why can't they just show the tweet in question and explain why it's wrong?<p>I'm assuming it's something like the numbers of vaccine complications reports have gone up in objective numbers but not relative to numbers of vaccinations and that could look scary on a graph - or something like that.<p>But why do I have to guess or search out the information myself? I would think a news article could and should easily incorporate this.<p>The big problem with this reporting style is that reality could be either Twitter unjustifiably censoring people because they don't like their politics by making harsh rule interpretations, or MTG repeatedly sharing harmful misinformation and deserving a ban. Because the NYT won't actually show information the reader is left not knowing and likely believing an interpretation based on what they thought going in to the article.
I don't care about the musings of idiotic politicians (and most of them are indeed idiots), but it rubs me the wrong way that Twitter is preventing the people from hearing where their tax dollars are going, and that Twitter has decided to be the arbiter of truth for society.<p>Also, according to the article, it seems like her strikes were for subjective comments. If this is the case, that strikes me as doubly wrong. According to the article:<p>> Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She included a misleading chart that pulled data from a government database of unverified raw data.<p>The phrase "extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths" seems to be a true subjective opinion if there were some non-zero number of Covid vaccine deaths. People might disagree on whether an objective number should be subjectively described as high or low, but it seems like that's an opinion.<p>Also, why describe a chart as misleading? Why not describe it as false information? There's a big difference. Whether you disagree with her data or not, Twitter deciding that a government chart is "misleading" is kind of horrifying as a precedent because data could still be true and marked as misleading. Are they going to ban politicians from discussing budget charts or crime statistics in public debates if they decide that it's misleading with no objective basis?<p>> The company had issued her a fourth strike in August after she falsely posted that the vaccines were “failing.”<p>Whether a government policy is failing or not seems highly subjective. Is this really vaccine misinformation?<p>> Ms. Greene was given a third strike less than a month before that when she had tweeted that Covid-19 was not dangerous for people unless they were obese or over age 65, and said vaccines should not be required.<p>Based on the survival rates for people in these categories, many people would say that this is accurate and based on a subjective risk-management analysis. It's certainly less dangerous for young and non-fat people. Did this really merit a strike even by their convoluted logic? Certainly not.
I hate that Twitter always hides behind vague TOS terms for bans like this.<p>They can, and should, ban all these lunatics, and they shouldn't need any kind of ridiculous TOS justification to do so.