Comment by enumjorge

I’m not convinced by the arguments from your first link. As stated by the article itself, a difference in the number of left-leaning vs right-leaning bans does not prove the standards for censorship are different depending on what side of the political spectrum you fall on. It could be that conservative content violates rules more frequently than liberal or centrist content.

It goes on to say this can’t be possible because it would mean that conservative content would have to violate rules at 4x the rate of others, and that statistically its highly improbable. Why? It’s a known problem that Twitter has a lot of accounts that are fake accounts from bad actors trying to sow discord in the US political system, and those tend to be right leaning. Didn’t Twitter relatively recently do a purge of a large number of accounts that were deemed fake? That could easily skew the numbers, especially because those accounts tend to engage in the kind of rhetoric that gets you banned.

And then the article points to cases where liberal leaning content doesn’t get banned even though it should. I can also find cases where conservative content violates the rules yet it didn’t face consequences, most prominently the president’s account. It’s not just liberals who get a free pass, so I’m not sure what that proves.

Is it possible there is a bias in how Twitter sensors content? Sure. But that article makes it sound like they have a data driven, mathematically rigorous proof that it’s true, and I don’t think they meet that mark.