Reddit is in a much less monopolistic situation. Twitter is a mandatory medium for public communication. That's which censorship on Twitter is worse than in a subreddit.
Besides, it's a long stretch to imagine that right-wing media convinces people to become right-wing. In my case it's rather the opposite: I've been super-over-surcovered with left-wing pro-women communication until my 30s (whether in media or in programmer conferences), I noted that the mantra "Women are oppressed all the time" didn't match what I witnessed in companies (e.g. men from GitHub CEO to Douglas Crockford and all the way down to colleagues are being fired upon unproven accusations by women), which made me investigate the topic only to find that 90% of feminists' arguments are incorrect, which made me search for more reasonable media, aka "right-wing media" according to left-wing media.
Liberals have made a speciality of accusing right-wingers of censorship. That left-wing media like Twitter resorts to censorship only reinforces the perception that the world isn't fair and severely biased with double-standards in favour left-wingers.
If anything, I wish Brexit + Trump meant the end of the ban on some ideas like discussing immigration or men's rights.
Arguing that Twitter is so necessary to public communication that it should be regulated as something like a common carrier (perhaps applying the same to Facebook and YouTube) is an interesting argument, but one you usually hear from the left, not the right. The right usually takes more of a hardline private-property viewpoint along the lines of, "private companies should be able to institute whatever rules they want on their platform, start your own if you disagree".
The network effect. Viewers are on Twitter, so no party can succeed without using Twitter for communication.
What's your point, are you saying that new political parties are only allowed to grow if build their own Twitter competitor or have pre-approved ideas?
Twitter IMHO is a very poor medium for public communication. It is very difficult to discuss complex issues like gender relations or the dynamics of immigration in a sober, thoughtful, nuanced manner via streams of 140 characters. In the former in particular I actually feel there's a definite case where Twitter amplified division; the notorious "SJW vs MRA" storm advanced little if any productive discussion and merely put people in opposing camps lobbying grenades at the other side.
If this is now "mandatory" for public communication now, I feel that's a huge downgrade from public communication methods in the past.
I don't want to presume to tell you how to use twitter but to me, it seems to be clearly geared as a one to many broadcast channel. It is much more akin to a protocol that allows people to subscribe to events/ideas/movements/news and get succinct updates about them. It is a terrible place for discussion objectively, but I believe this was by design-- and a feature.
I do agree with you there. Twitter is great for immediate notifications like that.
For discussion, if people, say, tweeted a link to their blog entry with their thoughts, I feel that would be a great use case of Twitter. Unfortunately some chose to do the entire discussion on Twitter. That often ends up poorly.
> Twitter is a mandatory medium for public communication.
That's the precise difference.
There are two solutions I envisage for Twitter's behaviour. One is a market solution of people moving away from it (e.g. towards Gab). This might be infeasible due to network effects.
The other is regulation: communication services above a certain size be required to be an open platform. This would still allow twitter to ban people, but anyone would be allowed to re-used Twitter's data feed making it much easier to set up a competitor.
> censorship on Twitter is worse than in a subreddit
Not least because anyone can set up their own subreddit with their own moderation rules.
I don't know if you can quite draw that parallel. /r/The_Donald (which I myself am banned from) isn't the entire platform. Twitter is an entire platform. The_Donald is meant to be an echo chamber, much like Sanders for President was, they too would ban people on a whim. However, me being banned from /r/The_Donald is not any where near being banned from Reddit itself. Someone blocking me on Twitter is not me being banned from Twitter.
My fear here is that Twitter and Facebook are now political machines, even if I agree with what they are doing -generally-. Facebook is cracking down on "fake news," I saw fake news all the time on Facebook, from left (re: vaccines, GMOs, The Kochs) and right (re: Obama, Hillary, Global Warming.)
So, which is Facebook going to crack down on, and which one isn't it going to? I get trolled on Twitter more from the Right, but I do get trolled from the Left as well. Which is Twitter going to crack down on? They don't seem to have an open coherent policy. If I'm harassed by left and right, but I see more of the right being banned, at what point does this stifle speech?
Sure Twitter and Facebook are private companies and can run themselves in whatever manner they wish, but if they -do- have a bias, they should be open about it. If Facebook and Twitter wants to win my trust that they are handling this correctly, they should make the data of their bans public. Even old forums have a ban list and often reasons for bans as public. There is no such public face for these two platforms. They don't even have to have names/handles as public, just a graph that shows the data behind it.
Apples and oranges. /r/The_Donald is a subreddit niche specifically for supporters for Trump, it is standard for a niche subreddit with a specific goal to ban users which attempt to hinder that goal from happening. Hillary-subreddit does the same.
I was more trying to express the irony of it, even if one a spot and the other is a platform. Twitter doesn't have a "spot" so it is the platform you get banned from.
Virtually everyone opposes banning people they agree with but supports banning people they disagree with.
Try to compare like with like. If you're talking about subreddits, is the donald any more of an echo chamber than e.g. shit reddit says? (which AIUI autobans people just for posting on some particular other subreddits). If you're talking about twitter they do seem to be applying different standards for what qualifies as "hate speech" depending where you are on the political spectrum.
Its extremely ironic that the group claiming to "champion the fight against the social justice warrior and their safe spaces" does pretty much the exact same thing as what they say they hate.
Welcome to the future where everyone is surrounded by a virtual reality bubble that endlessly strokes their ego by reinforcing their preexisting beliefs.
Honestly I see a lot of people doing this and agitating for it. Everyone wants a "safe space."
Do Twitter and /r/The_Donald have equivalent mission statements, though? I don't think Twitter aspires to be a meeting point for extreme political views.
Sure. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? The T_D subreddit explicitly says that dissent is not tolerated, so yes, I suppose it is in line with the purpose of the sub. The problem is with them being upset with twitter for enforcing their purpose: a platform open to everyone to express themselves outside of hate speech/abuse.
If they were engaging in abuse, I agree that it's hypocritical of them to complain. From the article however it is not clear if they were abusing people or just voicing right wing ideas, which as far as I know, is not forbidden by any TOS:
> Several alt-right figures have been suspended from Twitter, but the social network is not saying why
I'm very interested in this topic. Do you have concrete evidence of contrary voices being silenced by administration in /r/The_Donald?
It may bear some consideration that this particular sub-reddit is itself silenced by having its stories removed from the front page by algorithm, which to me represents as great a sin or greater.
/r/The_Donald has in its sidebar, literally, that people that do not wholly support Trump are not welcome.
That being said, I'm okay with that. It's not a place for reasonable discussion, it's just shitpostland.
However. Twitter prides itself on being a serious social network with considerations for free speech and the "new media"... being banned from something like that just because of what you believe is silly.
There is no data other than available to the mods of The_Donald or reddit at large, but there are A LOT of results just a google away, this was the first hit [1].
I agree that if is hypocritical however clearly the scale is substantially different. Subreddits are typically echochambers especially small niche non-defaults.
Twitter is a platform. Your analogy would be more akin to Reddit banning a subreddit-- which happens. I personally disagree with platforms like google, reddit & twtr editoralizing & policing things like ideology & expression. I certainly lean more libertarian here, but actions like this certainly are a slippery slope. It appears like favoritism in a benevolent view and censorship in a more hard line stance
Those things don't match up like you think they do. The equivalent of /r/The_Donald banning users is equivalent to /r/politics banning anyone who posted critically of Clinton between July and the election (even though The_Donald only claims to support Trump whereas Politics is intended to be more unbiased).
These are subreddits with their own admins managing them. Twitter as a company is banning users from their entire platform. The equivalent would be Reddit as a company banning very liberal users.
> /r/The_Donald echo chamber bans anyone with a counter view to their own.
When you know there are super PACs literally spending millions of dollars to manipulate people on sites like Reddit, and other subreddits (like /r/HillaryClinton) also ban all dissenting opinions, why would you leave yourself so vulnerable to attack? Just so you can brag about occupying the moral high ground?
Reddit's completely opaque, volunteer moderator system guarantees that every single subreddit is biased in one way or another. /r/The_Donald was only doing what was necessary to create a community where people could discuss Trump without being berated and silenced by downvotes.
I'm not sure if it makes sense to compare Twitter, a general communication tool used by every demographic, and a subreddit, which is a privately ran community.
For example, Twitter bans them from using Twitter, but the /r/The_Donald echo chamber bans anyone with a counter view to their own.
If you want freedom to speak on certain platforms, you need to provide the same rights to everyone.