Take a deep breath and a step back. Twitter is a private enterprise. They can set their own rules for what they want or do not want on their service. Including whom they want or do not want on their service. Full stop.
When I was coming of age and changing web-hosts a lot of experimentation with co-located servers and other fun geek things that seems so quaint now in our cloud-computing world, one thing always stuck out to me which is the hosting and distribution of legal adult content. It was very hard to find a web host that would allow an individual or company to host pornography. Trust me, this wasn’t some second-life I had but just in terms of service, it always stood out. “No adult content”. The way around that? You would buy your own servers, mail them to a rack space and rent space on their rack. Would the CDN you chose allow Pornography? Well, you should find one that does. You should also probably maybe up front tell the physical place your servers sit that’s what you’re doing but most don’t ask and don’t have you. You’re renting space in their locker, nothing more.
Imagine me spending $5 a month for a shared hosting plan on GoDaddy, breaking the TOS by sharing War3z or Pr0n or Emulators of Nintendo games then crying “censorship” when they killed my account?
Imagine crying censorship with a service that effectively charges you $0 and I do the same thing? LOL.
Imagine crying censorship about any company who takes your money or not who operates privately and has a terms of service you agreed to choosing to uphold that agreement?
That’s what’s going on…and so what, let’s pretend for a moment that Twitter, Inc is entirely steered by all of the bad people you think are in charge (I honestly don’t know who because it seems the evil people change every week) but even if that was true, they can put anything into their TOS like “Users shall not mention Benghazi” and guess what, you agreed to that…now get in line or don’t bother using Twitter.
There’s a TOS for the App Store, for your iPhone, even iTunes has language when you install it that you can’t use their software to create nuclear weapons:
“You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons.”
Do you plan on using iTunes for this? Then maybe you should install a different media player! If you do and Apple sues you, you can’t cry censorship. You agreed to the terms. This South Park clip comes to mind – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qslcnw-9KbI
It’s unfortunate that the aggregation of technology means that if you want to reach people online, you likely will have to buy an Android or iOS device, will likely have to use AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon and you’ll likely have to use an App Store & social media service and all of these things will have terms of service and all of them can take it away at any time.
…and if they don’t, you may at some point break a federal law and have all communication stripped from you like Kevin Mitnick. Shit happens, sorry but you have to play by the rules. Don’t like them? Tear up your credit cards, drive to Northern Maine and homestead off the land and make your own way. I’d much rather see someone form a commune than go to war over their rights on private platforms.
Then again, for the last 15 years, I’ve professed (against nearly every one with a brain) that the Internet is not a human right. You aren’t entitled to Internet and I think we should implement a RealID for Internet which would stop bullying and cyber crime and I think we should require people are themselves (not aliases) online and I think if you prove you can’t handle Internet by re-sharing proven untrue things, then we take it away from you. Pay your bills via US Mail and get a landline because you’re off.
20 years ago, I used to reply to my mom when she’d forward me chain mails about “recent crime waves women should be looking out for” and I’d go to Snopes circa 2001 and send her a reply “mom, this chain mail crime wave is fake..please stop forwarding them to 10 people”
That same behavior is happening today by the same people except now they’re re-sharing it to millions of people and the other side has some how proven that Snopes and any fact-checking service is deep-state and so you know what? You lose Internet. I wish we could make people take a test and show them deep-fake images, fake news, ask them to install Adobe Flash from a website with a TLD ending in *.ru and if they fail all of these tests, they can’t get online or if they can, they can’t access social media. There are services like Hox Hunt that send fake emails to corporate users to see if they click the links and sign on with their corporate ID and if you do that enough times, they send you the employee to special training to learn about phishing. They need that for everyone.
We have made technology so easy to use and so accessible without ever educating people about things they shouldn’t click or share. It’s criminal and technology, the creators, those in charge are partly responsible for giving everyone Internet access and not helping them understand the great power they have. We have activated millions of people who, without the World Wide Web, might not be so angry.
EDIT: About an hour after posting this, AWS pulls Parler’s account which reportedly was paying about $300,000 a month for hosting. They can now spend about a million bucks to co-locate their own servers in another country. At the small level (like this blog) and the large level (like Parler), people should own their own domains, their own services, their own spaces. You can exist on the Internet fairly free of censorship so long as you own the entire stack. Then again though, Feds can pull your domain any time they want to so that’s a pretty high risk for them in 2021 given the shift in leadership to democrats – https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/united-states-seizes-domain-names-used-foreign-terrorist-organization If USA classifies Trump supporters as domestic terrorists (that’s a generalization and a stretch), then they can start seizing domain names whenever they want. I personally hope it doesn’t come to that on either side. That would actually serve as a big blow to an open Internet and Justice department seizing of domain names seems to go up every year.