> because they completely disregarded preexisting company policy for dealing with political figures

That was the company policy.

Public figures were largely exempt from the rules except when their tweet was egregious.

Not sure why you think this is some conspiracy when it was blatantly obvious.

Playing devil's advocate in Twitter's defense:

Is there any public information about how twitter handled the two examples you provided at the end there? Do we know for sure they actively chose not to take any actions?

If not, I'm not sure it is fair to claim they completely ignored them. They may have limited their reach via some kind of shadow banning. Action like that is harder to notice than an account ban.

Also, since your examples predate the particular ban we are discussing, do we know for sure there weren't policy changes in between. Perhaps even because of examples like the ones you list.

Personally, I wonder if Twitter might have a more American-centric view of the world and a higher sense of urgency for "events at home", so to speak. That could go some way to explaining what seems to be selective enforcement of their terms of service.

Have you considered that many people here actually work in companies and know how they work, meaning they don't need a media source to know that the Twitter files are bogus? In fact, most people here have brains and can think for themselves, and we actually don't rely on a media outlet for all our takes.

Have you also considered that there is a huge difference between Khamenei and PMs saber rattling online against other countries (which was actually consistent with Twitter's then current policy of treating world leaders, Trump included, with a lenient hand) vs. a president not condemning and (very likely encouraging) an attempt by his own supporters seeking to overturn an election as said attempt was going on?

The larger problem isn't the lack of uniform enforcement. Our actual problem was trusting Twitter to remain impartial in the first place. It's crazy how many people bought into the "global town hall" bullshit Elon Musk pedaled, and now it's unsurprising to watch him backpedal now that the reigns are in his hands.

Hopefully people realize that trusting $COMPANY will never deliver you anything good. We either regulate the things we care about, or let stuff like this happen. Either way, the world keeps spinning.