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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

Nothing.... the President is not a king and can't order people/companies to de-exist and can't be above the congress....

At most there will be courts involved, and the order will be considered null and void. Similar to many of his executive provisions that got declared invalid by the courts.

This is just a narcissistic/rage hissy fits, or just another attempt to create noise and detract from the real issues of this country is facing now.

Basically another political show/childs play from our president

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The Pavlov effect over his actions taught him so far he can basically do whatever he wants without any repercussion.

Wrongdoing anything? Noone could call for his accountability.

You're investigating him? You'll be fired. And every successor of yours who does the same.

You're his friend or donor getting in trouble with law? No problem, it will be taken away.

So, yes, I'd think twice before saying any of his actions would do "nothing".

> Nothing.... the President is not a king and can't order people/companies to de-exist and can't be above the congress....

You may want to read the article.

He's not saying Twitter "can't exist" (and why would he? It's his platform of choice.) -- it seems like they're going to say that if social media companies start editing content, they're no longer platforms and instead publishers, who can be sued for their content.

This could be very problematic for Facebook, Twitter, and Google, who would suddenly be open to a lot of lawsuits based on their users' content.

The easy thing to do is to have two policies: one for politicians, and one for everyone else. The policy for politicians will be one that holds their actions to a much higher standard than everyone else. The policy can say that metrics will be used to determine if the statements by the politician are false or misleading, and if a certain threshold is reached, they can/will(/should!) be banned from the site. They can provide a detailed analysis about how they came to the conclusion to ban the user.

Who is a politician and who isn’t?

Thanks for the point of clarification: Elected officials, which should be easy for any social media company to determine, especially since, at least on Twitter and Instagram, they have "verified" profiles.

> they're no longer platforms and instead publishers, who can be sued for their content

They could and have been sued all along. Plenty of people file inane lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and Google all the time for content that gets posted on their services. I wouldn't be quick to imply that these lawsuits would result in successful outcomes for the plaintiffs would it not have been for the existence of Section 230.

>This is just a narcissistic/rage hissy fits, or just another attempt to create noise and detract from the real issues of this country is facing now.

You don't think it's a problem that a platform which controls the information that reaches millions of eyes, acting as a mouthpiece for the president, applies a totally subjective "fact check" disclaimer based on an uncharitable interpretation of the president's tweet, while pretending to be politically neutral?

And while ignoring similar misstatements from other politicians on both sides of the aisle?

The issue here, and I cannot stress how dangerous this is for society, is that an entity which gatekeeps information for millions of eyes, is pretending to be a neutral party while overtly manipulating the messages of politicians from one political party.

This creates a manufactured consensus which is influences policy and elections according to the whims of a handful of high level managers/executives at Twitter. It's an abhorrent concentration of unnofficial, unchecked soft power and it was hugely irresponsible and unethical for Twitter to publicly pick a side without a massive disclaimer.

This isn't even getting into the holes in the "fact check". What a joke. How much hubris do you need to believe that your tech company can act as an arbiter of truth?

You and I see different problems here. To me, the problem is a platform (and therefore legitimacy) has been granted to someone who abuses that power at every turn.

We (those arguing against you) are not empowering Twitter as the new POTUS, merely trying to minimize the current one’s ability to cause damage via lies and hateful rhetoric. (Things you or I would have been banned for years ago)

There will come a time to deal with Twitter’s societal overreach too.

>lies and hateful rhetoric

There is simply no objective definition for either of these concepts and if you may be fine with Twitter having this kind of power now, but you may regret it if the shoe is ever on the other foot.

Having a corporate arbiter of truth is antithetical to a free society, especially when creating one's own platform is impractical because of network effects.

Who is going to fact check the fact checker? Effectively Twitter has the final word because this is their platform - not because they are correct, and if these political squabbles had an objectively correct answer then we wouldn't have multiple parties.

People are find with it right now because it's en Vogue to hate on the president, but that doesn't mean the fact checking is justified or even honest - and I reiterate, the dangerous part here is that people implicitly take Twitter to be an authority when they absolutely are not. Their fact check isn't even accurate, but people don't tend to question what they want to hear.

Twitter's role is a neutral party - the same way that journalists are ultimately doing a disservice to society by editorializing everything while claiming to be neutral. It is dishonest and divides society from the top down.

I actually agree with everything you’re saying. But the real world demands compromise. There is no ideal authority.

> lies and hateful rhetoric

If Twitter really cared about the "lies and hateful rhetoric" they would have put their money where their mouth is and banned him years ago. It's just a meaningless gesture to drum up more drama, more clicks, more views.

user: tw000001

created: 19 minutes ago

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What this have to do with my point?

This seems overly simplistic to me and premature. You are declaring "null and void" something that you haven't seen (at least I was unable to find the actual text just now).

Obviously any President has lots of legal options when deciding how any law is applied and interpreted.

It appears that this is a shot across the bow from a political standpoint or to use another military metaphor, Trump is attempting to shape the battlefield on this issue and there are indeed lots of legitimate issues regarding Section 230.

Bingo. Checks and balances.

> Bingo. Checks and balances

By that you mean games, actual checks and account balances from bribes right? Just another mafia state style leverage play here.

Care to provide some evidence to back this assertion up?

Art of the "Deal"

> actual checks and account balances from bribes right? Just another mafia state style leverage play here.

Not that things cannot be significantly improved or that I'm not extremely disappointed with our level of political executive leadership, but if this is what you think a mafia state is, I wonder what you would call the situation in other countries where things are significantly worse.

The world runs on self-interest and leverage, people seem to have forgotten that. The current climate screams this reality.

The zero-sum game disciples are in power and calling the shots. I don't personally subscribe or believe in that ideology but it cannot be denied that the current state of the world is steeped in it.

In game theory, if the other side cheats and your side keeps cooperating, you will lose every time. There is a great little game theory game that highlights it here called The Evolution of Trust [1].

[1] https://ncase.me/trust/

Dismissing this as some petty doom-to-fail attempt to fulfill some narcissistic desire would be foolish, as recent presidential history, from GW and especially through Obama has shown us the levels we have allowed executive overreach to rise. Obama designed the blueprint for achieving things without Congressional approval.

Executive branch powers have been increasing at least since the Great Depression, arguably beginning with or before Teddy Roosevelt.

Sure, but not to this degree. We are in perpetual war, excuse me, "targeted campaigns in the interest of National Security" because of the last two.

If you think executive overreach started with GW, then I suggest you go back a little further in history... around 70 years or so.

See my sibling comment. If you think the overreach the last 2 decades is the same as the previous 5 then I don’t really know what to tell you.

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