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As opposed to that old concept of actually letting people engage in FREE SPEECH?!?
Except as I tried to make clear in the rest of the email, it's not the speech that's the issue, but the actions.
Want to post how much you hate (to pick an example) mexicans on twitter? Go for it, it's unlikely you'll be banned.
Encourage hundreds, if not thousands, of others to tweet racist shit at a single user? Its your action there that gets you banned. It's not what you've said so much as the fact you've led a charge. Twitter'll deny you the tools to take those actions.
My comment was in the context of a commercial decision, and yes, the sane commercial decision is to remove those that are causing issues, if they're in the minority. They're a corporation and can't let a small chunk of revenue drive away large chunks. It's that simple.
Reddit had to go through a similar thing a while back, and shuttered coontown (amongst other subs). Many predicted the demise of reddit, but in reality, whilst some users left for Voat and probably never came back, most of the remaining subs continue to thrive. Admittedly, that was more about getting money to come onboard in the first place, so it was as much about the investors sensibilities as the userbase.
> A lot of speech will bother _somebody_. If a service removes speech that _somebody_ claims to object to, fairly soon there will be little or no speech to see.
I agree. And booting someone for saying something offensive isn't right. Encouraging others to descend, en masse, on someone else though isn't just speech, it's incitement - an action. Or at least as much as an action as the average user can actually take online
>I suspect these people are merely trying to justify PC censorship
I suspect you dropped "PC" in there because it's one of your trigger words. This isn't about political correctness, this is about people getting targeted, en masse, because their skin's the wrong colour, or because they lack a penis (or in some cases, have one). Not about protecting peoples sensibilities, but about outright, deliberate victimisation.
FTR, There's fuckload wrong with world of Political Correctness, especially once you get people arguing that we should use so-called "positive discrimination".
Leaving actions aside, and going back to the original reason I mailed the list, Mirimir noted that ACLU supported the KKK's right to rally. IOW they defend the KKK's right to free speech.
ACLU don't however, let the KKK hold those rallies in their carpark, or provide them with megaphones etc. There's a big difference in defending the right to speech and actively helping someone make that speech.
I see this as much the same, you've got the right to say what you like, and I'll gladly defend that, but I'm not going to help you say it.
Why would Twitter be any different? Hell, the world in general is no different. You don't see Breitbart hosting guest columns from lefties, just as you don't tend to see liberal publications inviting the alt-right to put their views forward. Each have to find their own, accommodating, venues to push their agendas from.