Read on Twitter
Let's talk a bit about online communities, policing them, and why the efforts of mendacious miscreants like Ted Cruz to ban 'silencing conservatives' are inherently bullshit.
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Let's pretend for a moment that you ran a children's game. There's someone on your forums who likes to talk to kids about meeting him out front in his white panel van. Should you have the right to ban him? Even if you know with certainty he's actually just a harmless jokester?
Of course you should. Even if YOU know he's harmless, the parents of your parents DON'T know, and they'll assume you're an idiot for trusting him. Word will get out, and your online community will be destroyed.
You run a Christian singles site. And for some reason, it becomes invaded with atheists and satanists, who simply wanted to have very earnest discussions with your paying customers about how stupid their faith is. Should you have the right to ban them? Hell yes you should!
These message boards aren't just a medium. They're a community and a product. Christian Mingle hopes to attract lots of Christians. They're trying to build a brand, and trying to attract a certain type of customer. They should have a right to exclude those that fight that.
When Ultima Online launched, the original dev team had a very 'anything goes' ethos - they thought griefing was funny! It was so much a part of the game and the team's culture that there were concerns that if we'd banned the hardcore griefers, our community would ever recover.
Not only did the community recover. It thrived. We DOUBLED our population by reducing the impact of shitty players, including showing a bunch of paying customers the door. It turns out the griefers were scaring off better customers.
(Somewhere in the midst of this, someone defined a 'griefer' to me as 'any customer who costs me more money than he gives me' and I still think about that a lot.)
Toxic people have a hugely disparate impact on any online community. In UO, we polled our players, asking what percentage of the population were hardcore griefers. The answer we got was 10%. The actual answer of players with that problematic behavior was 0.1%!!!
(This finding led to my Rule of Surviving Twitter, which is 'anytime you feel Twitter is crushing you, block the worst 10 people in your feed'. It takes a very small number of toxic people to fill your feed with poison)
This isn't unique to UO -- AT ALL. League of Legends has discovered -- and has been battling the same thing for years. See Jeffrey Lin's excellent GDC talks about player toxicity. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-Player
What's this have to do with Twitter? Easy, it's exactly the same as UO and Christian Mingle. It's just a community. Only it's bigger. Way bigger.
Twitter should have the freedom to shape their own community standards for its game, and that revolves primarily around what it allows and what it bans. The result is WHO THEY ARE as a community. And that result will determine whether they attract or repel new customers.
Does Twitter WANT to be known as a nazi cesspool? Does it want to be known as a safe place for LGBT discussions? Is it a place you can trust your kids to hang out? Does it want to be known as an absolute free speech forum? This should be ENTIRELY up to Twitter.
Seen in this light, any online community -- including Twitter -- not only has a right to ban dissonant community members, they have a responsibility to their shareholders to do so!
(Remember UO doubling their numbers?)
(Remember UO doubling their numbers?)
You and I can and should disagree with the lines they choose - that's okay! And no matter what lines they choose, there will be failures, as the human element in moderating content is immensely subjective in nature. And that's okay, too!
But the idea that Twitter should be forced to carry uncensored lies of an authoritarian leader is a hell of a lot closer to Orwellian than the idea that Twitter should have the freedom to STOP doing that.
The idea that Twitter is so big that they no longer get that freedom is absurd. Parler and Gab exist. Myspace was the biggest platform as recently as 2008. Tiktok didn't exist five years ago. Someone will replace Twitter. The community they build will likely be why.
And as a parting shot, if you're saying that your political beliefs cannot be represented if you don't allow conspiracy nuts and racists to speak, and unfounded lies to be spread, you're telling on yourself.
