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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Jack Dorsey has spoken about this on Joe Rogan's podcast, and he basically says that it was a judgement call where they weighed the public interest in the tweets against the violations of the tweets.

EDIT>> I dug up the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K571_jqnCpM

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As part of the public, I would rather my President's tweets not be lies, half truths and flat out nastiness.

Alas, this is what The People democratically voted for; and with our current voting system, the will of us 49% who don’t want to hear it counts for nothing u_u

53.9% of us voted against Trump.

of the 58% of eligible voters who actually voted.

Implying...?

Fraud!

31.3% of the eligible population voted against Trump. 26.7% voted for him.

Exactly! He didn't win the popular vote.

The popular vote has never mattered, and Americans have never changed that, despite having a couple of centuries of ample opportunity to do so.

The whole reason there is a United States of America is because each state would get a voice in choosing the president. By only going by popularity, a few select cities decide all. If it was proposed that way, the USA would never have formed and we'd have a bunch of individual separate countries.

“The only reason we have an application is because the original developers wrote it in COBOL. Refactoring it to the realities of the world today is blasphemy!”

What is so different? Are you sure the USA would hold together if they changed the voting structure so that NY and LA ran everything?

How would that be worse than a few key districts in one or two swing states running everything? Presidential candidates can afford to ignore entire sections of the country because they don't matter.

One could at least make the argument that the population centers should have more weight because that's where most of the people are, and those cities have the greatest financial and cultural influence. But why should, say, Iowa be as important as it seems to be in every Presidential election?

Because otherwise only New York, Texas and California matter, which the framers of the Constitution decided was a bad idea.

I actually like the principle of the electoral college, it reminds me that the US is in fact, a Union of States.

The real issue I see are the rampant gerrymandering of the congressional districts, which have a far greater skewing effect on the results than the electoral college (well, technically the same because the congressional districts are identical to the electoral college).

The States are also gerrymandered, and we are stuck with it for ever. When states like Wyoming and the Dakatos were formed it was calculated based on the left/right debate of the day, slavery.

If the majority of people live in LA and NY, then that'd be reasonable, but that's not the case. If we got rid of the electoral college, rural voters would still be a substantial portion of the population. In the current system rural voters in California are being drowned out by coastal cities where as urban voters in inland states are being drowned out by rural districts.

Americans whose votes are counted in the current system have never changed that.

States representing a large majority of the US population have all passed legislation for a national popular vote, and no one doubts that a national popular vote on whether to have a national popular vote would succeed.

Nobody won >50% of the popular vote.

Who is the arbiter of truth? Jack Dorsey?

Identifying lies doesn't require perfect knowledge of all truth.

Did Dorsey clarify what he meant by public interests? That sounds like a vague distraction.

I think "preserving the words of the president" probably fits pretty squarely in the realm of public interest, even if they're blatantly false.

Giving him a platform in the first place is what necessitates the consequent fact checking. If they didn't distribute his lies they wouldn't need to contradict them. Many media outlets have stopped airing Trump's statements live, because doing so is essentially unethical.

Removing it from the normal tweet status is separate from preserving them. They could archive them and disable replies, retweets, quotes, and so on. They could remove it from feeds. They could frame it differently.

Not really, no. That's the WH's obligation, not Twitter's.

Jack Dorsey's public interest is increasing engagement and making money. That's it.

Especially if, I would say.

That's not Twitter's job. There are people who are supposed to do this.

When you have become one of the de-facto news sources for a sizable portion of the population, it does sort of become your job.

Whether it’s good that they have become a news source or not is a valid question. But right now, they are, and I think preserving the president’s tweets seems like a pretty easily defensible decision. Even if it is also (or primarily) motivated by their own business interests.

Do you need Twitter to preserve the words of the President, though? Rephrasing, can the President’s words be preserved just as well without Twitter?

If the answer is yes then Twitter isn’t performing the civil service it claims as it is not an archival medium.

I know for a fact my aunt mails in ballots for her husband, her father and her mother. Claiming that there is no mail-in voter fraud among 300 million Americans is quite absurd in my opinion.

So assuming this is true, two things.

One, why haven't you reported your aunt for voter fraud? Voter fraud is a very serious issue and it seems to me that you're letting a criminal go free. This can be easily verified by telling the government and having the three others confirm who they voted for.

For two, if she is mailing in the ballots, then is she forging their signature as well as collecting their SSNs? Or are they simply signing on the ballots themselves agreeing to the votes? In which case is that truly fraud or not? If she's forging signatures then she's also committing identity theft which is a very serious issue, one that I hope you agree deserves reporting.

Snitches get cross stitches. Don't report your family - talk to them.

I joke with my kids that it’s snitches get ditches to amp up the nonsense level.

I didn’t say there’s zero voter fraud. I said his tweet, which suggests that more mail in ballots will lead to “substantial fraud” is false.

That said, perhaps “unsubstantiated” is a better description.

It's a bit absurd when claims of rampant mail-in voter fraud come without evidence from a New Yorker in the District of Columbia who votes in Florida by mail.

And by public interest he means the valuation of his company when all the Trump fans revolt and leave twitter.

That is inevitable. Trump will one day not be president. And one day while not president he will bitch tweet in a way that dramatically and clearly violates the terms of service. Twitter will have reached its Rubicon with respect to Trump and the public interest / head of state exception they've carved out, and they'll have to make a permanent decision.

My fantasy is that the day Trump stops being president, Twitter bans him with no explanation or comment.

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