Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

I hate to have anything even vaguely in common with Trump, but there is some sense in this.

The platforms have been shadow-banning (a particularly egregious policy), censoring, and otherwise shaping the content on their sites for a good while now.

At the same time they claim to be merely a 'pipe', conecting content producers, and consumers.

They can't have it both ways.

This 'executive order' is obviously a spiteful, and frankly, unbelievable-that-it's-legal move by this, man, but there is still a germ of truth to it.

For me, tagging content, but still making it generally available, is far less sinister than disappearing it, or only presenting it to profiled users, etc, etc.

IMHO.

Any modern pipe connecting consumers to producers is going to rely on some sort of matching algorithm to map the two. If they just used some sort of dumb FIFO -- user retention and advertising dollars would disappear.

Like it or not, there are political ramifications in that algorithm no matter how hard it tries to be neutral. Even platforms that stay 'hands off' are shaping content and it's almost impossible for them not to while retaining what we've come to expect from a modern platform.