Comment by nomilk
1 year ago
There's sifting to be done, but a scan over the top few pages of results (of 35,000,000 news articles total) shows a handful of bans for true but unpopular stances and opinions: https://www.google.com/search?q=banned+from+twitter+-trump+b...
Given only a fraction of account bans make the news, the problem was probably much bigger than the news indicates. Maybe 10-100x (what's the ratio of newsworthy to regular folks?). Also, when a prominent user is banned, others see that and clam up on the topic lest they face the same fate; they tread on egg shells, which doesn't constitute a healthy community for them.
Google provides different results for different users, skimming over my result list, I found nothing. Something concrete please?
George Hotz gives a good example [1]:
> Cloth masks are ineffective against covid, that's a true statement, every doctor in 2019 knew it, and now I'm banned on twitter for saying it? Interesting.
Keep in mind for every famous ban, there might be a few orders of magnitude more bans of small accounts we don't hear about given Twitter "use(d) Artificial Intelligence to identify posts" "that are misleading enough to cause harm to people" [2].
Also keep in mind this is one topic of thousands that could get an account banned, there is no shortage.
Please keep in mind my broader point is simply Twitter might have felt like a community for some, but not for everyone. If someone's banned for stating hard truths, that's frustrating to say the least, and I think to some extent makes the individual feel like it's a not a welcoming/fair community to be part of.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJg0hAKtzt8&t=243s
[2] https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...
I do not watch videos as sources and in the article there is:
"Among Greene’s final tweets was one Saturday that falsely referenced “extremely high amounts of covid vaccine deaths,”"
Also cloth masks did help with reducing transmission (think a sneeze).