So the rightwing chatter on this predictably is that this proves Twitter has an anti-conservative bias.

The reality remains: they coddle conservatives so much that by the time they're forced to take action it's a big deal. Katie Hopkins got so much special treatment. https://twitter.com/HuffPostUK/status/1274012116647849984

There are things in the Twitter community guideilnes that are phrased as absolute rules with no tolerance but when you report a conservative for it, or somebody acting along lines of privilege, you hear back "Well, there's context.", "Well, we have to look at a lot of things."

People to the left of conservatives and people who are marginalized can get suspended or banned off the site *for just repeating the things that those special protected groups say to us*.

The most absolute crystal clear example of this is the account that deliberately got itself suspended just by tweeting exactly what Trump tweets, word for word.

I don't even know what Katie Hopkins was banned for (and nor am I asking) but I do know that years ago she tweeted a call for Muslim genocide and while she got kicked off a radio show she was not kicked off Twitter.

I don't remember who it was who got suspended on here for literally saying "the goys" in Yiddish, which I'm not going to type because it got them suspended for threatening to kill people and I'm sure there are far-right trolls who search for that phrase so they can mass-report.

But while Jewish tweeters can be kicked off for speaking Yiddish (look up "the" in Yiddish or just remember that Simpsons episode with Sideshow Bob's prison tattoo in "German", if you're not getting it), white supremacists can tweet about killing them and Twitter says it's a joke

And when anti-Semites get reported for threats involving ovens, Twitter says "We have to look at context and that's obviously a joke." I mean, there is a context to threatening a Jewish person with an oven and it makes things worse, not better, but also THE RULE IS ZERO TOLERANCE

As it's written Twitter has forbidden itself to consider the context of a threat. Their rule against threats is so broad that telling someone to die in a fire or wishing they would die is considered a threat.

Except. They make exceptions all the time.

And as I make the point that Twitter's exceptions run along both partisan/political lines and power/privilege lines, I want to emphasize they're not the same thing. You don't have to be a conservative to get away with being racist, nor are conservatives the only racists.

Here's a story from 2018 about Twitter's CEO intervening personally to make sure that Richard Spencer and Alex Jones were allowed to break Twitter's rules.

This after they rewrote the rules to create an island of ambiguity for Trump to operate in. https://twitter.com/Techmeme/status/1036608313558032385

And when Alex Jones finally, finally went too far in the wrong way at the wrong moment and all the internet platforms realized that the slack they had given him was now rope around their neck, even though he'd been given special treatment all along...

...the narrative from the right was that this was an unfair *crackdown* on conservative views, that Alex Jones finally suffering some consequences for breaking rules he'd explicitly agreed to follow was a sign conservatives were being targeted.

And do I even need to bring up how the social media companies have refused to apply their anti-terrorism algorithms to white supremacists *because when they test it, it flags conservative politicians*?

Time after time, case after case, what we see is actually happening is that conservative pundits, politicians, and perspectives get elevated, sheltered, and coddled by social media, even when they break the rules, even when they inflict harm, even when it embarrasses the platform

But when they get the least little slap on the wrist - or when, after being emboldened by years of lax and non-existent enforcement they just go way beyond the pale - the cry is: "This platform has liberal bias! They're out to get conservatives!"

And that right there is part of why it happens, of course. Just like they've done with the traditional media, conservatives "work the refs", trumping-up complaints about the opposition and crying foul whenever they themselves are punished.

Claiming something is biased motivates the decision makers to prove they're not biased, which usually translates to going easy on you and making an example of someone else.

And that intersects with and interacts with all the normal messed-up power differentials, the way that sympathies and institutions both tend to run along the lines of privilege, in terms of who gets slack, who gets suspicion, who is assumed to be dangerous and who is not.

Anyway. TL;DR - Twitter (and basically every social media platform of any size) is incredibly biased towards letting conservatives get away with literal and figurative murder, and the reward they get for coddling conservatives is they get backed into a corner and then yelled at.