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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Correct as to first sentence. Partially correct as to second.

Some of the people saying Biden is illegitimate are fools and knaves. Some aren't. Some are lying and putting out false information on purpose. That group would be manipulators, propagandists, political operatives, etc.

This highlights a danger in moderation. Words are replacements for brute force and violence. (Unless you're Putin.) Manipulation is a way for men to try to get what they want by getting others to agree to it, or by tricking them. Advocacy and promotion often involve lies. Modern advertising is rife with lousy, sleazy tactics. And one of the bedrocks of our culture, religion, is based on telling people fabulous bullshit stories.

Within the concept of "moderation," or akin to it, is this idea that "misinformation" should be banned. As you note, platforms don't want to get into that. But a whole lot of people who "think they know best" and the politicians that pander to them definitely want to find ways to stop "misinformation" from spreading. (Just this week, Biden's admin [not Biden, but people below him] started a task force on "misinformation" in response to Musk buying Twitter.)

This thinking elevates words to the level of actions. They are not the same thing. (Eazy E was not actually killing people in Compton. Bret Easton Ellis may have given some serial killers some ideas, but he is not one himself. The Anarchist's Cookbook is not the same thing as a pipe bomb built using its schematics.)

Words are different from actions, as is the absence of them (silence is not violence).

No one may yell fire in a crowded theater. But that's a very limited form of exception, based on immediate fear of imminent arm. "Misinformation" regarding elections is not within that exception. It is, in fact, something politicians have been using since politicians have existed. LBJ famously joked about accusing an opponent of being a pigfucker to win a Congressional seat.

People are not going to stop doing what they want to do to get what they want. Take away the right to lie and manipulate and they'll simply revert to violence, the thing they used before advocacy and manipulative behaviors replaced it as instrumentality of combat among civilized people.

I get that you have a principled aversion to content moderation, and you analogize Twitter's decisions about which user content they will publish on their platform to a government deciding which speech it will ban. It would be interesting to see you, maybe just once, acknowledge the fact that Twitter is not the government, but a private business funded by investors who want to make money, and that it is not banning speech, rather deciding which speech it wants to subsidize to publish -- "subsidize" because of course Twitter doesn't (yet) charge users to tweet, and incurs real costs. Now you are again talking about "fire in a crowded theatre," a First Amendment principle, but of course Twitter is not the government.