> Want to ban group X which is fighting with group Y in a tit-for-tat skirmish over decades? How do you decide who is right? How do you decide truth?

I think there is a difference between ‘right vs wrong’ and ‘factually correct vs incorrect’.

Platforms like Twitter will rarely be in a position to decide right/wrong, because in many opposed discussion both sides will use the platform.

On the factual correctness, platforms can more easily take a stance in high impact cases. I would assume that they’d have out the same warnings on Biden’s Twitter if he had said ‘I won’ on Tuesday.

That leaves a challenge: how do you decide what’s a fact? For example on the vote count. Most outlets say the reported figures are fact, but it implies trusting the process of counting and reporting. Removing that implied trust means others can take ‘there is fraud!’ as fact just as well.

Twitter seems to use the mainstream media (eg AP predicting the election outcome) as a base of trust (and so do I). But I’ve come to realize that once you don’t trust the media, it is easy to believe in another set of facts (that are true for you), and suddenly (to you) it seems Twitter is censoring.

I hope people will find and trust each other again.

>> That leaves a challenge: how do you decide what’s a fact? For example on the vote count. Most outlets say the reported figures are fact, but it implies trusting the process of counting and reporting. Removing that implied trust means others can take ‘there is fraud!’ as fact just as well.

>> Twitter seems to use the mainstream media (eg AP predicting the election outcome) as a base of trust (and so do I). But I’ve come to realize that once you don’t trust the media, it is easy to believe in another set of facts (that are true for you), and suddenly (to you) it seems Twitter is censoring.

I'm glad you brought up the case of the election. It is a harder question for social media to arbitrate centrally. For example, "There is Fraud" could be true or false, and certainly somewhere you'll find fraud making the statement both true in fact and false in spirit. Then, there is the dark matter of everything the newspaper doesnt even cover -- US newspapers only regularly cover US news, allies, key areas of the world, and major events. Imagine a dairy-farmer trade war between two asian nations -- unlikely to be covered, so what is the truth? For that matter, imagine the civil rights of small minorities in the US -- depending on the minority group, unlikely to be covered even by major us newspapers.

Let me give you a harder example now. Anything to do spanning two sovereign nations, especially one involving war, civilian casualties, or war crimes. Pick your example: Russia/Ukraine, China/Taiwan, India/Pakistan, Yemen/Saudi Arabia. Both sides will have their national own newspapers which will support their own country. Which side does Twitter take?

This reminds me of the episode of Mythic Quest where they decided they wanted to ban Nazis--but then they started asking, "Who else should we ban?" The committee ended up with a horrifyingly-unwieldy list of hate/predatory groups. They felt it was just too many, so they put them all into a bracket and voted--Nazis still won.

By the time the meeting was over, the engineers had figured out a way to flag all the Nazis and just moved them all to their own instance. Problem solved.