This article seems to be a smoking gun... https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48c...
Note that there are plenty of other custom icons that Twitter allows.
Note that there are plenty of other custom icons that Twitter allows.
EDIT: I ask because this is an example of an attack ad targeted to an individual candidate rather than a general promotion or political concept, which I can see why Twitter wouldn't necessarily want to promote.
Any ad that directly mentions the opposing candidate, no matter how polite, is an attack ad. And there is no guidance from ANY regulatory authority that I can see, that bans, discourages, or even regulates them.
Which, frankly, has been an issue that plagues them on both sides of the political divide.
A blog post (not journalism!) by a paid member of a political campaign infamous for its loose relationship with fact and truth, quoting other paid members of the Campaign, to push a particular message that the campaign has been aggressively pushing...
I mean, dude, what the fuck. How can you call what is literally campaign propaganda produced by two members of a partisan campaign PR department a "smoking gun"?
I'm at a loss for words. What is happening to Hacker News?
Your response is overblown and strident.
As the article says, this move cost Twitter millions in revenue. If you don't have the ability to just choose not to make money because you're not interested in the transaction, you don't actually control the company, the public does.
It is if you allow the other side to do exactly the same, as noted in the linked article.
The other side is not doing exactly the same. The other side never intended to do exactly the same, and for good measure, the CEO promised that if they did, they would be prevented from doing so, too.
You are now making the claim that, if side X exhibits behavior A, and opposing side Y exhibits behavior B, it is no longer legitimate to compare behaviors A and B - whatever the behaviors are, they are exactly the same simply because they're held by opposing sides.
The other side wanted a custom icon. They got it. The content of the icon is irrelevant to the question "did twitter censor political views not shared by the CEO?" The answer is "yes", regardless of the content of the icon granted to the other side.
They were allowed other hashtags that didn't have the same negative "attack ad" approach so it doesn't look like politically motivated bias so much as them just not wanting to promote negative attack ads on their platform.
You can call it censorship. That's fair. But it's unfair to call it bias or politically motivated censorship.
It absolutely, most certainly is not. The content is quite vital to the decision.
If the Clinton campaign ran an ad that was targeting Trump in a similarly negative way and Twitter allowed that, then it would be bias.
But so far I haven't seen that counterexample.
By your logic, taking down a post of someone being doxxed is also censorship.
"No attack ads" isn't the same thing as "no anti-Hillary attack ads". If you can cite the Hillary campaign getting a custom emoji for an anti-Trump hashtag, do so.
Irrelevant. Twitter denied them a custom icon whereas allowed their opposition to have one. The content of the icon has no bearing on the matter. It's censorship. That is twitter's choice but it is still censorship, based on the CEO's politics.
This is NOT TRUE.
Click the article. Look at the screenshot. It clearly shows the Republican National Convention was afforded a custom emoji.
You've fallen for some propaganda.
Maybe it is. It is still censorship. And it is based on the political opinion of the CEO.
If they apply the same approach to different political campaigns it doesn't seem politically motivated to me.
I suspect it was approved because #RNCinCLE isn't an attack/allegation on someone else. I also believe it was a Twitter-initiated hashtag, not one bought by the RNC.
I similarly suspect the Hillary Campaign would've seen an application to add an emoji to #DumpTrump rejected. Hell, Pepsi probably can't sponsor a #CokeSucks one.
> However, both DNC and RNC conventions had custom emojis this cycle and they did not use disclaimers.
> But, the only other campaign large enough to have this type of deal would have been the Clinton campaign and my contacts inside TW informed me that they did not have one in place. So basically, “cancelling for all political campaigns” really meant cancelling ONLY for Donald J. Trump’s campaign.
The DNC and RNC both got custom mascot emojis for their hashtags, and the Trump campaign did not get a #CrookedHillary emoji, nor did the Clinton campaign get (or ask for) a similar anti-Trump emoji. So the other side was quite clearly not allowed to do the exact same, nor did they even ask to do the exact same.