Surely you can agree that, if the rule is no "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals", a conservative who is arguing that personal pronouns are silly is either compelled to bow to their opposition or violate the rules. Or that, in an argument about illegal immigration, a conservative forbidden from "asserting that members of a protected category are more likely to take part in dangerous or illegal activities" will find it impossible to convey their belief that illegal immigrants are more likely to commit crime.
I don't personally agree with either position, but those rules clearly give conservatives an explicit disadvantage.
And the implicit advantage was more clear- I don't have a twitter account, but whenever I followed a link there, there were piles of recommended tweets about how white people are all racist, or complaining about toxic masculinity / mansplaining / manspreading, or how christians are evil and hate women, or how much boomers suck- all of this clearly in violation of the rules, none of it censored. Well, maybe some of it was censored, I wouldn't know. But they certainly left quite a lot untouched.
> Surely you can agree that, if the rule is no "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals", a conservative who is arguing that personal pronouns are silly is either compelled to bow to their opposition or violate the rules.
The only thing they are not allowed to do is make direct targeted attacks against a specific person. You can say this is a dumb policy, you can rant about the concept in general, all you can’t do is say “@alice you’re really named Bob”.
Similarly, you can rant about immigrants and they wouldn’t do a thing as long as you could resist specifically targeting people.
Again, my point isn’t that Twitter was perfect or that they had solved every issue for balancing freedom of speech in an open forum but simply that rules against targeted attacks are not anti-conservative unless you have a very negative view of conservatism. It’s popular to try to score in-group points by whining about censorship but there’s a reason why nobody has been able to provide examples of actual conservative ideas being censored, because they know as soon as they do it’ll turn out to be something else which most people consider reasonable or, like the NYPost ban for hacked materials, a decision affecting one account which was reversed.
The rules are designed as such so that "well meaning" and well-thinking individuals such as yourself can provide an aura of protection over their actions, and "technically" be right. But in practice, the debate is definitely stifled in one direction.
Just look at the list of "notable Twitter bans", and you'll see a pattern. Among the clear "incitement of violence" and bot-accounts, there is a huge pattern of "we got banned and we don't know why, but we're vocal about X,Y,Z". One has to read between the lines. I'd be all for your argument and with you if we could have a clean-room look at the Twitter data to confirm, but we don't have that. Where is the twitter ban dataset that we can all have a look at?
Unfortunately, your beliefs align with that of the oppressor's side, so you don't see these and it'll be uncomfortable for you to go out on a limb. You think the system is "working as expected" and "they're only banning you if you target specific people".
I don't personally agree with either position, but those rules clearly give conservatives an explicit disadvantage.
And the implicit advantage was more clear- I don't have a twitter account, but whenever I followed a link there, there were piles of recommended tweets about how white people are all racist, or complaining about toxic masculinity / mansplaining / manspreading, or how christians are evil and hate women, or how much boomers suck- all of this clearly in violation of the rules, none of it censored. Well, maybe some of it was censored, I wouldn't know. But they certainly left quite a lot untouched.