Scott Ritter permanently banned off twitter for the third time
(www.scottritterextra.com)
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Elon, as with most people who promote free speech, just believe in free speech for speech they believe in.
His management of the banhammer can be arbitrary. You can't have free speech with bans. You can't have commercially lucrative speech without pervasive censorship, something that I think Twitter is experiencing. I think Twitter will continue to engage in pervasive censorship in order to remain marketable.
Banning is lame in almost any circumstance. I really don't get how that became an acceptable moderation tactic. It might make sense (like a chat room) where you want to gatekeep, but not on the entirety of an open platform. Back in the day most IRC servers would not ban someone for anything they said in a channel. What do the admins care what people are saying?
There are a few times where you have to ban an account. If they are an obvious bot, abusing the service, spamming repeatedly, or their posts are legitimately damaging to the host company (i.e. threat of lawsuits) but otherwise just moderate and curate the content.
Yeah I differentiate spam prevention and genuine censorship. How you accomplish the former is more of a formality. And then you have viewpoint based bans. I believe you have to have those to be advertiser friendly. You have to ban the people that are widely derided and only liked by a niche. You have to do the whack a mole thing with rules violators.