One thing about the first amendment is that it doesn't have conditions. This type of thing that Twitter is doing will be full of them, ie selectively defining what's political or not.
The question is whether this is a lesser evil than allowing political ads but selectively blocking stuff with very broad and potentially inconsistent moderation rules. I personally think totally blocking is the easier of the two in terms of decision making but I expect this will generate far more false positives in the end on the fringes and grey areas.
It's a good thing we'll now have two different experiments, on a large scale, to see which one is more self-destructive.
One of the main problems that I see is the outsized influence we've given to the very-vocal but small parties on social media to have on silencing other people and groups, going well beyond the limited free speech exceptions we previously observed in society for over a century (culturally, not just legally). Neither of these approaches really addresses that problem at FB/Twitter. Which is why I'm curious which one is going to expand those grey areas, where the abuse/downside risk remains, rather than reducing it.
The question is whether this is a lesser evil than allowing political ads but selectively blocking stuff with very broad and potentially inconsistent moderation rules. I personally think totally blocking is the easier of the two in terms of decision making but I expect this will generate far more false positives in the end on the fringes and grey areas.
It's a good thing we'll now have two different experiments, on a large scale, to see which one is more self-destructive.
One of the main problems that I see is the outsized influence we've given to the very-vocal but small parties on social media to have on silencing other people and groups, going well beyond the limited free speech exceptions we previously observed in society for over a century (culturally, not just legally). Neither of these approaches really addresses that problem at FB/Twitter. Which is why I'm curious which one is going to expand those grey areas, where the abuse/downside risk remains, rather than reducing it.