My view is that Twitter could solve many of the problems by creating 2 scores out of say, 1000, for each user. Given the millions on Twitter a score out of 100 would be too coarse.
1. Don't censor anything from anyone who I follow.
2. Score A is a metric based on geographic location similarity to you, and who you follow. So if you are bicoastal and follow your friends from LA, NYC you won't have Oregon or Pennsylvania proximity bumping up someone's score. But a person in Ohio whose friends cover the tri state area will have a different score for the same twitter account.
3. Score B is topic similarity and popularity. So if an account is sharing news about e.g. Docker/Mesos/k8s, and it gets a lot of likes or retweets, then it has a higher score.
Finally, you put an option in the user settings to block someone commenting on your TL if score is less than x , and silently down rate if score is less than that. For both scores A and B.
The above is based on what I have seen on Twitter, which is unknown to you people doing a sort of drive by harassment, often after someone who disagreed with you retweets your post.
So, why is Twitter such a car crash as far as censorship goes? I've heard of shadowbanning, account limiting, double standards for freedom of speech based on political orientation and now stuff like this.
Who's running the show and thinking "yep, censoring more people on one side of the political spectrum is what we need right now"?
> So, why is Twitter such a car crash as far as censorship goes?
There's been many theories. The overiding idea being pushed from the "media" is that Twitter simply doesn't censor enough "hate speech" and "harrassment".
I have a lot of qualms with this though. I mean, FB by a long shot doesn't censor anywhere near as much. Take a look at basically any thread there. Yet still...FB seems to manage user-base and stock value wise. So it can't be the above theory.
The other, for obvious reasons more suppressed, reason is that they censor and control too much, and the control they do do, is like you say, one-sided and bias.
There's plenty of evidence that supports bias censorship on Twitter, yet there's none that Twitter doesn't censor enough, at least when you compare to Twitter.
To be honest, I'de be pushed to think that people love scapegoating "the other side", "bigots", etc., for the collapse of Twitter, just so they don't have to come to the realisation that their political orientstion pushes people away from a platform. It's essentially admitting defeat right?
It had an opportunity to develop narrowly drawn rules that could have formed the bedrock of digital free-speech norms.
Instead, it engages in selective whack-a-mole-style enforcement, with a strong bias that favors a progressive point-of-view.
This is nothing but a ham-handed patch.