New Boss Same As The Old Boss: Elon’s Twitter Locks NY Post Account Over Tweet That Broke Twitter’s Rules

Stop me if you've heard this one before: the NY Post tweets a link to one of its own news stories, and Twitter decides that it violates the company's rules (perhaps very questionably so), and in response, locks the NY Post's Twitter account. Also, as part of the same crackdown" on sharing certain media, Twitter also suspends Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's account.

Except, we're not talking about anything having to do with Hunter Biden's laptop. Because this happened just last week.

Can't wait for the House subcommittee investigation into this one. Oh, and the Twitter Files on this are going to be lit.

The details here are... kind of a mess, and I almost hate to get into them for fear it will derail the conversation. Basically there were a bunch of tweets about a protest to highlight the importance of the rights of transgender people. The name of the protest was a trans day of vengeance." As with so many culture war topics, this one was then weaponized by anti-trans people who were tweeting about it as well (and misrepresenting it, but that's a separate issue).

And, because content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and because Twitter trust & safety seems to be managed by people who haven't completed their speed run of the learning curve yet, they decided to delete all tweets from everyone on all sides that were showing a poster promoting the event. Around the same time, the company also suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's account over her own tweet regarding the event.

Twitter's, um, explanation of this was confused and didn't make much sense:

Twitter's trust & safety boss, Ella Irwin, also explained the reason for taking down all those tweets was that vengeance does not imply peaceful protest," though I'd argue the context of the event (1) suggests otherwise and (2) suggests that, contrary to Elon's claims, this is yet more moderation that goes way beyond the 1st Amendment. And, of course, this is all allowed (and perhaps even understandable under the true content moderation guiding light of please, for the love of anything, just stop being jerks on our platform").

Anyway, the NY Post wrote about the account suspensions, and apparently, the tweet about that article then resulted in the NY Post account being suspended and the account locked:

Hours later, however, Twitter reversed course and reinstated the NY Post's account.

Again, all this is perfectly within Twitter's rights, but I have difficulty seeing how it's even one iota different from what happened in October of 2020. At that time, Twitter also applied a policy badly in the heat of the moment as things were moving quickly, suspended the NY Post's account, and then admitted they were wrong and reinstated the account.

Mistakes sometimes happen. But people are still talking about the October 2020 version. Even this guy had something to say about it, as part of his justification for his attempt (at the time) to purchase Twitter:

That's Elon Musk directly saying: Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate"

Note that there's no caveat there. There are no conditions. No suggestion that maybe it was a mistake that was corrected a few hours later (as happened in both cases). Just a flat out that suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate" even though the identical thing happened under Musk's watch as well.

But, in this case, people seem willing to let it slide by and Musk seems to think that he should be judged on a totally different standard. I mean, it's almost as if he and his fans use different standards to judge Musk's actions vs. the actions of the old leadership.

An intellectually honest response might lead to a recognition that perhaps the October 2020 actions were a similar type of mistake and correction, and should be forgiven just as this latest mistake and correction are being forgiven. But that would require some intellectual honesty and not rooting for one team to win and another to lose. And, apparently, that's too much to ask for.