The previous White House admin saw their press secretary’s account suspended because the campaign didn’t like the fact that she tweeted about this story.
The current White House likely wouldn’t see that same fate.
That’s still fundamentally not the issue here. It shouldn’t matter that there was a certain bias at Twitter at a particular time. What matters was there was a) a serious lack of transparency into decision making and b) a very broad policy/culture of censorship, where ill-defined and ever expanding “misinformation” and “threats to democracy” was enough to silence not only public messages but private DMs between individuals.
People say it’s a hard problem to define the limits of content moderation, but when you have politicians and influence groups sending lists of tweets to silence and the only response is “thanks we handled it” then obviously the limits have gone out the window.
We don’t have to have a free-for-all to massively reduce the risks in the current system.
Limitations and transparency are what defines a good system of governance. Bias in administrations will always exist, but honesty and shining sunlight on it is the only thing that will stop it from turning into a cancer.
The previous White House admin saw their press secretary’s account suspended because the campaign didn’t like the fact that she tweeted about this story.
The current White House likely wouldn’t see that same fate.