Twitter as a Source

A couple of weeks ago, there was an incident on Twitter, where a republican representative's advertisement for her campaign was removed for an inflammatory statement about Planned Parenthood. This post is not about that specific incident, and I am not trying to make this political, I just wanted to reference a recent situation that brings up an interesting question. That question being, where should social media platforms draw the line for pulling down content, and is it within their rights to bring down content they deem to be inflammatory?

I think this question has some interesting implications and it is something we as consumers of all kinds of media and content need to consider with the rising use of social media, and them being used as platforms for news. Social media as a whole, is a method for absorbing content in a new way and can almost be treated like a way of aggregating many different kinds of content into one easy to access place. But they are still private businesses and should be granted the same liberties as other private businesses of being able to deny people service, and put out the type of content that they want to put out. Right? I think that's a difficult question to answer at the moment and one that has a lot of layers to it.

While they may be private businesses, they are very much becoming a method for continuous news consumption, and maybe we should hold the platforms themselves to the same level of scrutiny that we do the places we get news from. We expect news sources to give an unbiased telling of an event to us, and in that regard, should we hold Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites to an unbiased filtering of content, or to a policy of no filtering of content? With sources in general, it is our job as consumers to sift through the news sources that we see and decide if they are telling us a whole truth of events and that helps us decide whether we keep using that source. Sometimes, our own biases can get in the way of sticking to a truly unbiased source and I think that can get in the way as well if Twitter or Facebook is filtering our content for us.

So, should it be our job as consumers to make sure we are informed, and know truth from lie, biased from unbiased, and choose what news content we look at on social media, not Twitter's or Facebook's algorithms/people tailoring our content for us and keeping their eyes peeled for inflammatory content?

I'm not trying to answer these questions here. However, it's something that I think we should all be thinking about for the future of social media. I want to hear what your guys' thoughts are on these questions. Where do you think we should draw the line for social media sites? Do you think they should have the right to remove content that they deem inflammatory?