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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

I will reemphasize an opinion I expressed on an earlier thread: this is an overtly totalitarian move designed to intimidate and suppress private entities' protected expression, disguised as a reaction to perceived bias (which would still be an invalid pretense for any such order). It's a disgusting attack on an American industry by our own executive.

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That own executive will attack any industry he doesn't agree with at any point he pleases. It's how he has done it for years in business and it's how he will do it in politics for as long as he isn't prosecuted and removed from office. As long as the Republicans keep supporting him and have a majority he will just continue to pull more and more crazy stunts and get away with it.

The Supreme Court has ruled that it “does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict...the free flow of information and ideas.”

See the case here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-44.ZO.html

The full text: "The First Amendment's command that government not impede the freedom of speech does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict, through physical control of a critical pathway of communication, the free flow of information and ideas."

Twitter is expressing it's 1st amendment rights by labeling tweets. Twitter is not the government, Trump is. The situation is completely opposite what you make it.

I don't agree with the executive order at all, but the person you responded to doesn't have the situation backwards.

People (such as yourself, and myself as it happens) will claim that this order violates the first amendment. However the Supreme Court has explicitly allowed such actions under very specific circumstances. One such circumstance was called out above.

So the question is: would the actions in this case constitute a step to prevent a private interest (ie Twitter) from restricting communication via control of a physical pathway?

How does fact-checking dishonest (or at the very least disingenuous) comments "restrict the free flow of information and ideas"?

The ideas still flow freely. Twitter isn't even forcing more accurate and factual information right next to the dishonest framing. You have to click the link to even see it.

This seems like world class straw-grasping.

A ruling like that makes me even more surprised that the government did not take steps to maintain net neutrality. I would say ISPs are a far more "critical pathway of communication" than Twitter is.

Them taking steps to prevent Twitter from "restricting" information really doesn't follow with the approach this administration's FCC took with ISPs.

Is providing fact-check links to the tweets of a specific person or group considered editorizing? Twitter said offering fact-check was not editorization, but the critics said that fact-checking a targeted group was. I have yet to see anyone clarify that key difference.

I could see how it would be considered editorializing. I haven't looked much at the facts in this particular case myself, but I've definitely seen cases where fact checks seemed to be dripping with a bias or agenda of their own.

But here's the thing: that's fine! I can see why people would think that Constitutional protections of individual free speech apply on social media, but regardless of if you think they do or not, then adding editorial content to the posts should be protected as well.

Do you think the 1st amendment protects your posts because they're "speech"? Yes? Then Twitter also has free speech on it's own platform, even if it's biased.

Do you think the 1st amendment does not protect your posts, because Twitter is a private company? Yes? Then Twitter is also allowed to say whatever it wants on it's own private platform.

There's a difference between censoring, which is a whole other discussion, and adding editorial or fact-checking content, and I just don't see how anyone can argue that Twitter can't do the latter.

edit: there's also a difference in individual free speech and companies having free speech, but I think Trump is the last person who can make a stand on the idea that commercial interests can't be operated based on individual preferences.

Twitter isn't targeting any specific group so this is a moot point.

They have been and will continue to "fact check" liberals and democrats too.

This reminds me of the dishonest framing of the IRS supposedly targeting conservative non profits for audits.

Yes, it is true Obama's DOJ targeted these groups.

What you'll never hear from the GOP talking points is that the IRS also targeted liberal groups for the same audits.

WSJ Editorial Board's take on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-plays-into-trumps-hands...

One key quote:

> On California, Twitter is right that Mr. Trump is wrong. But on voter fraud, it’s complicated. There isn’t evidence of widespread fraud in mail voting. That doesn’t mean there’s no evidence. Last year a close House election in North Carolina was thrown out because of accusations that a Republican operative illegally collected absentee ballots, including incomplete ballots that his workers allegedly filled in. Investigators then also charged him with doing similar funny business in 2016.

Since they do not alter the content of the tweet itself in any way, and since "fact check" link itself does not express an opinion (eg: it just says "get the facts" as opposed to "potentially misleading") then it seems extremely hard to arge that it's editorialising of the tweet. If the fact check page contains very opinionated content written by Twitter employees then it might bring it closer into consideration, but if the fact check page factually summarises and cites external sources again it is hard to argue.

Yes. It's the sort of behavior one usually sees from lesser-country petty tyrants like Erdogan (Turkey) and Netanyahu (Israel). They're elected, and don't have full autocratic power, but they heavily abuse what power they have to stay in power. This problem was classic among the central American countries and Mexico, although that part of the world is looking up a bit.

Historically, leaders like this are not rare. They're just rare in US history. In the US, they've rarely advanced beyond the mayor level. (See Tweed Ring, Pendergast machine, Daley machine, etc.) Huey Long made it to one term as Louisiana governor; he's the best known US example of the type.

Thank you; I find it concerning that so much of the response to this has been focused on Twitter's behavior, and so little on the President's. I would hope that even people who think Twitter's fact-check links amount to censorship would agree that Trump would be wrong to censor Twitter in retaliation.

Although, I will say that if you've ever moderated a forum or subreddit, you probably know that when you ban a user for stepping over the line one too many times, "I'm gonna shut this place down!" is a pretty common first response. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and we won't have to find out what happens when the President and the first amendment come to blows.

Trump is salty because supposedly these social media platforms lean left and are biased against the right. I can bet if it was the other way around, he wouldn't sign this. It is absolutely a partisan thing. I am not even saying whether he is right or wrong in his claim. But he is doing this only because the social media platforms supposedly hurt the right more.

This attack on Sec 230 is radical and may well have far reaching consequences, but it is in no way totalitarian. It is trying to classify Twitter (& others) as a publisher. The US does not treat publishers in an unreasonable manner.

Twitter is _the_ place where political discourse happens. It's an unfortunate state of affairs for some that it happens to be a private company with a bias. And for better of for worse it does have a bias.

Who should host this discourse instead? The government? A perfectly impartial Vulcan? CNN? Fox?

It can be a private company it just needs to be regulated. I think you are underestimating how big Twitter is... It's way bigger than CNN its way bigger than Fox in fact those networks regularly quote tweets.

By eyeball-hours, Fox is much bigger than Twitter among American audiences. Viewers tune into it for hours, on a daily basis.

What kind of regulation is it subjected to? It doesn't have to be neutral, and it has a legally-tested right to lie, and mislead. And that's for first-party content directly produced by it.

Do you have a quote on eyeball hours? Fox at most gets 2-3 million viewers at prime time. Twitter has hundreds of millions of users and their reach exceeds even their membership, as Tweets often drive narrative on many other platforms.

You can read the order. Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act set out provisions protecting internet service providers from liability for obscene, lewd, etc content on the basis they are a neutral platform (like an email provider) and not an active arbiter and curator of content published on their page. The law clearly states it's protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material (lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessive violent, harassing, etc). Not for editorial protection. Not for arbitrary enforcement of TOS.

Major networks regularly quote Twitter. I would hate for Twitter to become an echo chamber like Fox news.

So you suggest the government gets to decide, through your proposed regulatory agency.

Looking forward to an army of bureaucrats making sure every tweet is kosher, then? An agency will last longer, with staff that lasts longer, than any single presidency.

Sounds like a nightmare scenario for an "un-PC" asshole like Trump.

I'm suggesting it has the same rules as a public square, which is what Twitter is. No incitement to violence, no obscenity etc but otherwise free.

You should realize those restrictions you suggest are regulated and enforced by the government and are applied inconsistently all the fucking time. Just look at how various different demonstrations in the last 5 years have been treated, and how some of them have ended in violence.

I really don't think you, or Trump, understand the ramifications of what you're asking for. You have this ideal, naive view of what's allowed in "public squares" that doesn't seem to match what happens.

See: Trumps belief he was persecuted by other government agencies. Which he complains about on Twitter. Which would now be answering to a... government agency...

If Twitter were a physical space there would be regular violence that would have to be shut down. The role of the government is to break up the violence if it occurs.

Again, that's a very idealistic "role of the government" that assumes there will never be anyone who interprets what should and shouldn't be allowed differently from you, or in a way that harms you.

And then, once that happens, now you have no recourse - even if you build another platform, it ends up controlled by the same regulators.

If enough people feel that it has a bias, and are discontent with it, they are free to start their own platform. They are also free to not moderate their platform, or even moderate it with whatever bias they so choose.

This has happened a few times (Voat, Gab) and the utopia of a hands-off content platform has never played out to anything other than a cesspool. Popular platforms remain popular and useful because they have the power to make editorial decisions.

I also assert that the world is not locked in to Twitter today, just like we were not locked in to Digg a decade ago. Users will flock elsewhere if they sense a need.

Great and then we will see even more echo chambers.

What people need is not another right wing echo chamber and not another left wing one either.

Twitter was that neural platform for a while where ideas clashed but now they risk the right splintering off and that is not a good thing for anyone.

Letting false election interference stay up, with a link to facts about actual elections, is pretty much the exact opposite of an "echo chamber."

It's easy to parrot oft-repeated slipper slopes arguments, but doing that is actually the echo chamber. Especially when now even bothering to check to see if it applies in certain situations.

People are free to reply to Tweets with sources and facts if they want to. I just don't think that should be Twitter's job.

This case is fair enough but I really do believe in the slippery slope argument.

It's also clearly not an echo chamber to talk about it here considering the number of downvotes I'm sustaining. I'm also seeing posts get upvoted before they get downvoted so it's controversial... Which is a good thing for discourse!

> If enough people feel that it has a bias, and are discontent with it, they are free to start their own platform.

This is, of course, disingenuous. It's like saying, just a monolithic railroad company was about to bulldoze your house in the mid 1800s, "If you're discontent, you can always start your own railroad company." We're dealing with a complex system of interconnected motivations. "Start your own Twitter" is an anti-solution.

Unless I'm mistaken, Twitter isn't really in the business of bulldozing houses or otherwise introducing themselves into your daily life without consent - the simile feels forced.

Wrong, because no one is bulldozing your house.

You’re on a street with a 100 houses and one of them is having a cool party. But the cool kids don’t like you and don’t want you in their house. The other 99 houses (Gab, Mastodon, theDonald.win , bulletin boards, etc.) welcome you in, but you don’t think their owners are cool and don’t want to hang with them.

Should the government force the owner of the cool party house to let you hang with the cool kids?

Many would say that violates freedom of association.

> Popular platforms remain popular and useful because they have the power to make editorial decisions.

Bingo. I think this is a point that isn't made enough: to the extent platforms like Twitter can continue to exist, it depends on their ability to remove spammers, harassers, and other unwanted participants. Imagine using email in 2020 without a spam filter. Because Twitter isn't an open protocol, they provide both the protocol and the spam filter.

To ask them to stop removing any content would be as disruptive to their business as asking GMail to let all emails through.

We really have reached the stage where "facts have a well-known liberal bias", haven't we?

What is and isn't fact is for people to decide by themselves based on evidence. Not whatever Twitter decides is the truth. There are very few hard facts in this world especially surrounding politics.

> There are very few hard facts in this world especially surrounding politics.

Surely this is false. The world is full of hard facts—politics less than the sciences, sure, but still [0]. What are much rarer (non-existent?) are undisputed facts.

[0] To be clear, I distinguish hard facts in politics, like "Trump is the 45th president of the United States", from hard facts in political science, of which there indeed seem to be very few.

> What is and isn't fact is for people to decide by themselves based on evidence.

That is why Twitter is linking some facts to go along with the President's tweets.

Which facts you choose can show bias. Let people supply sources in replies.

Is the free speech of Twitter to be abridged? Section 230 allows good-faith moderation. Whether or not you believe they should do it, current law and court rulings have come down on the side them being allowed to do it and maintain their safe-harbor status.

We are taking about reform not what the current state of the law is. Twitter has an outsized impact for the small number of people who make those decisions.

You have to look at social media like a newspaper that publishes letters to the editor. They're the editor, you're writing letters. The editors are free to throw away crazy letters, edit letters for length, syntax, and content, or discontinue the section entirely. That's what free speech is. If a newspaper won't publish your letter to the editor, you can make your own newspaper and publish whatever you want.

You need a really good reason to take away Twitter's editorial control over Twitter. Please provide one. (The best I see so far is "Twitter is really popular, so they shouldn't be allowed to edit their own website." I am not convinced that that is a good justification for limiting the freedom of the press. If that's where we want to go, I would be the first in line to make sure Fox News drops their conservative bias and gives liberal viewpoints a fair shake. Does that sound good to you?)

What decisions? You think the government should be able to control whether Twitter adds additional context to posts?

For almost 100 years it has been held both in general and by the Supreme Court in particular that the remedy to speech you disagree with is more speech. Do you object to Twitter's ability to have such a disagreement?

Or, as is being proposed, do you believe Twitter should be held legally liable for every nasty thing said on their platform simply because they choose to have an opinion of their own?

To me that seems like a recipe for significantly more banning of content & users by Twitter to avoid even the hint of liability that would come with allowing it to stand.

What is and isn't evidence is for people to decide by themselves based on facts?

Again up for people to decide. Let people post facts and their sources in replies rather than have Twitter do it.

> it happens to be a private company with a bias

Political speech in public squares are what the First Amendment was written to protect. “Bias” isn’t an exception.

Twitter is now that public square.

Then the solution is to nationalize Twitter and enforce the first amendment there, not this.

> U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled on May 23 [2018] that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums and that blocking Twitter Inc users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-twitter/trump-u...

What's your point? That's a ruling against Trump, not against Twitter. The President can't arbitrarily block access to his communications.

Not in any way that matters, and certainly not in the legal sense. In a legal sense, Twitter is your neighbor's backyard, and your neighbor is telling you to stop lying about sleeping with his wife or get the fuck out of his yard.

Twitter is so much bigger than your neighbours back yard. Debates between most major public figures don't happen in your neighbours back yard. And it doesn't matter what the law is now, think about what it represents to people first then the future law comes from that.

In the legal sense, replies to tweets of government officials have indeed been public square since 2018.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-twitter/trump-u...

As a member of the government, Trump cannot selectively choose who can or cannot view things that are the public duty of his office. He can't ban people from watching White House videos on Youtube and he can't block people on his public facing government account.

This does not mean that Twitter or Youtube cannot ban them from their site or control what they do on their site. It means the government cannot selectively enforce who can or cannot view their content. If Trump came over to your home and asked to hold a SOTU, you have the right to turn him away. However if you agreed to let him hold a SOTU and he decides to turn away your friends because he doesn't like them, that would be against the law.

There have been rulings protecting free speech rights in shopping centers. There have been rulings protecting free speech rights against HOAs. There are certainly many cases where a private company has tried to leverage power over free speech and lost and this is one of those cases.

What is the alternative? I haven't seen Twitter be too heavy handed, I have yet to hear of a moderation activity on their part that seemed to go too far. If there is something to be frustrated about, it would be their double-standard for world figures that are allowed to violate their ToS with impunity.

I can't think of a single platform with a more hands-off approach than Twitter that hasn't become a toxic cesspool.

To be honest I think they are walking the line right now. I would worry about them taking it any further. The problem is there is nothing stopping them taking it any further.

What’s the bias? It’s verifiable facts versus lies and disinformation.

“ Twitter is _the_ place where political discourse happens.”

Say what? https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

Twitter is a minority.

Fox News Channel is arguably the place where political discourse happens. It’s the most popular cable news network in America.

Should Fox News be regulated and forced to have a democrat on each show?

Fox News is subject to liability and lawsuits if they publish defamatory statements on their platform. And that statement by Pew says nothing about the leverage and influence that Twitter enjoys on the national conversation.

Twitter was crazy for Bernie, but Joe Biden won the primary anyway.

Twitter is a self-selected minority of power users. It isn’t “The place” for political discourse, it’s simply a popular online web forum. Facebook is likely at least as influential on politics as twitter is.

That's not real political discourse, that's programming. Also major networks regularly quote Twitter.

The thing Twitter has is that it is a public forum where people who disagree can meet. I'd hate for it to become an echo chamber like Fox news.

They practically do have a democrat on each show. Times have changed, and Fox News is not at all what it once was. They even hired Donna Brazile, famous for slipping CNN debate questions to Hilary Clinton in advance and then being given the job of running the Democratic National Committee.

I'm not convinced it does have any bias against mainstream political ideas (obviously it is biased against things like white supremacy). This just lays bare that the "free speech" advocates are nothing of the sort.

No, Twitter has no bias against "mainstream political ideas". Their San Francisco urban chic politics are the very definition of today's "mainstream". Looking back over history, have mainstream political ideas always been the right ones, more or less? Or have mainstream political opinions frequently been pretty bad in retrospect?

The point of "free speech" is to be able to express opinions that aren't currently "mainstream" among fashionable thinkers. Free speech advocates aren't objecting to a single instance of some company expressing an opinion. That was just a "last straw", it seems. They are objecting to the tactics of Big Tech platforms in general, which use all sorts of deceitful methods to manipulate the visibility of arguments in order to influence the debate while pretending to be merely neutral platforms.

Thank you. Finally some hope. The problem is people think the current political landscape is somehow fundamentally different like history doesn't apply. Big picture view.

No it's not. Twitter currently enjoys immunity from section 230 of the communication decency act. That protection requires that they are not editorializing content. Fact checking content is a form of editorializing. If you want to do that, no protection and you are open to lawsuits. This has bi-partisan support and they are simply reining this in which is long overdue.

That is not editorializing. Day in and day out journalists print news stories that have been fact checked and contain links to source information. And then there’s the opinion section. It’s clear which Twitter was doing, and it wasn’t editorial.

Newspaper doesn’t enjoy the protection of Section 230.

That doesn't matter because we can't even start talking about S230 until we agree that what Twitter did was editorializing, which it wasn't.

> That protection requires that they are not editorializing content.

Please cite the law that says that, because it's certainly not S230.

S230 was specifically made to empower sites to moderate, editorialize, and remove content as they see fit for their platform.

IANAL but I think Section 230 does not extend blanket immunity for any moderation "as they see fit," because then they would be a publisher and should be held up to publisher-type liability.

> Section 230 protect a blog host from liability for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” [1]

The phrase "otherwise objectionable" has come under limited judicial review. It is not a unlimited catch-all, but relates back to the meaning and purpose of the preceding language, mainly dealing with mature themes.

The Ninth circuit reviewed a case against Malwarebytes where they were blocking access to a competitor and they were hoping for Section 230 protection, but the Ninth found that "otherwise objectionable" did not extend to anti-competitive blocking. [2]

I think it's also interesting that in this particular case it is not even really a question of restricting access or availability of material. Twitter is editorializing -- essentially adding a Editor's Note to Trump's tweet.

That Twitter has to right to do this is unquestionable. The question is whether in doing so they have crossed a bridge into become a publisher and not a platform protected by Section 230 immunity.

If you read the history / case law which Section 230 is meant to address, the issue was a contrast between Compu-Serv dodging liability from statements posted by users because they were not moderating topics, vs. Prodigy being found liable for user-posted statements because they were moderating topics.

> Section 230 was enacted in early 1996, in the CDA’s Section 509, titled “Online Family Empowerment.” In part, this provision responded to a 1995 decision issued by a New York state trial court: StrattonOakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. The plaintiffs in that case were an investment banking firm. The firm alleged that Prodigy, an early online service provider, had published a libelous statement that unlawfully accused the firm of committing fraud. Prodigy itself did not write the allegedly defamatory message, but it hosted the message boards where a user posted the statement. The New York court concluded that the company was nonetheless a “publisher” of the alleged libel and therefore subject to liability. The court emphasized that Prodigy exercised “editorial control” over the content posted on its Congressional Research Service site, actively controlling the content of its message boards through both an “automatic software screening program” and through “Board Leaders” who removed messages that violated Prodigy’s guidelines. [3]

CDA's intention was to allow "good faith" / "Good Samaritan" moderation without triggering publisher liability. The CDA was not designed to totally eliminate the entire concept of publisher liability on the internet.

There is a lesser standard of liability which falls upon distributors based on content which they "know or should have known" violated the law. It's a higher standard than publisher liability because it requires establishing direct knowledge of the offending material. Very interestingly, the courts found that CDA 230 actually precludes even distributor liability in the case the service knows or should have known of the illegal content, because distributor liability is a subset of publisher liability and if they don't have publisher liability then they can't have distributor liability. (I'm sure I'm butchering this explanation somewhat).

This has become a problem as of late with issues like revenge porn or online harassment campaigns where service providers had refused to take down material even after being notified it was illegal, and were getting protection under Section 230 for keeping the content up!

[1] - https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230

[2] - https://www.wileyconnect.com/home/2020/1/22/ninth-circuit-re...

[3] - https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/LSB10306.pdf

From the same article:

> Do I lose Section 230 immunity if I edit the content? Courts have held that Section 230 prevents you from being held liable even if you exercise the usual prerogative of publishers to edit the material you publish. You may also delete entire posts. However, you may still be held responsible for information you provide in commentary or through editing. For example, if you edit the statement, "Fred is not a criminal" to remove the word "not," a court might find that you have sufficiently contributed to the content to take it as your own. Likewise, if you link to an article, but provide a defamatory comment with the link, you may not qualify for the immunity.

You may be held liable for the commentary you provide, but you are not liable for the content you provide commentary for, even if you choose to sometimes provide commentary.

And the next paragraph from that EFF article;

> The courts have not clarified the line between acceptable editing and the point at which you become the "information content provider." To the extent that your edits or comment change the meaning of the information, and the new meaning is defamatory, you may lose the protection of Section 230.

I'm not qualified to say what the limit is, I'm merely hoping to provide some background on how 230 came about and that it does have some form of limits.

What's particularly unclear to me is that if you have a site under active moderation which could even include editorializing some small percentage of the posts that are made, how does that impact the potential liability from posts which you don't editorialize.

Right, again: if your edits cause the content to become defamatory, you may be liable for that specific content. Modifying any particular piece of content does not cause you to lose sec 230 protections in general.

So unless Trump's original tweet, or Twitter's fact check are defamatory or otherwise illegal, Twitter doesn't care.

> of material that the provider or user considers to be [...] otherwise objectionable,

That seems like a pretty blank check for moderation to me, at least. "Otherwise objectionable" can easily be defined in a ToS, and you're off to the races.

It does in English, but in legal construction an ending "or otherwise.." usually limits its scope to items similar to the ones at the start of the list.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/ejusdem_generis

> For example, if a law refers to automobiles, trucks, tractors, motorcycles, and other motor-powered vehicles, a court might use ejusdem generis to hold that such vehicles would not include airplanes, because the list included only land-based transportation.

(I'm not a lawyer.)

Even if that’s your take, doing this with an executive order feels like a totalitarian move.

edited for typos: Honest question with this comment. Which would you rather have controlling content. A private company that has not public accountability or a political official who was put in office via a democratic election? I get that a lot of people do not like Trump, but currently, even if he wanted to be a totalitarian leader the US currently has checks and balances that protect from that.

You ask that question as if it were a choice between the two. It's not. We have neither scenario now, and neither is being proposed.

What we have is private enterprise, and government regulation. Neither has complete control, neither should have complete control.

> even if he wanted to be a totalitarian leader the US currently has checks and balances that protect that.

What checks, exactly? There was an impeachment recently wherein he refused to hand over any documents and witnesses. Those witnesses who chose to testify in the House were retaliated against. The Senate refused to hear any witnesses (a first for impeachment trials in the US). The President argued that if he believes his conduct will help his election, and he believes his election will help the American people, he cannot be removed for the conduct. The senate affirmed this view by acquitting him of the charges and refusing to remove him from office.

Or maybe the IG system checks him and his agencies? Well he's been busy firing any IG who is investigating him or his cronies like Mike Pompeo. Michael Atkinson was fired for bringing to light the fact that Trump was extorting a bribe from a foreign nation using taxpayer dollars. Glenn Fine was to oversee the spending of coronavirus federal dollars, but Trump wanted control of the money himself, so he had to go. Christi Grimm was fired for investigating PPE shortages in hospitals. Her findings flew against the Trump narrative that "everything was fine" so she had to go. Steve Linick was investigating corruption in the State Department, so he had to go at the request of the Secretary of State under investigation. Mitch Behm was investigating corruption of the Secretary of Transportation, who is the wife of Mitch McConnell, who refused to hear witnesses at Trump's impeachment trial. So he had to go.

Or maybe the Justice department is a check? They are supposed to be independent after all. Well, they're busy interfering in cases related to Trump's friends and associates. His Attorney General is happy to run interference for Trump in a number of areas, whether that be misrepresenting the Mueller report, intervening in Roger Stone's sentencing, or declining to prosecute a man who already plead guilty to crimes. Oh, and an internal memo of the Justice Department states that the President is immune from indictment. So there's no check there.

Maybe the court system can check Trump. He's been arguing in court that he has absolute immunity from investigation. He already enjoys immunity from indictment due to a memo written decades ago, but he asserts that he enjoys absolute immunity from even being investigated in the first place. If Congress and the DOJ can't even investigate him, how is the court supposed to hold him accountable?

Americans really love to trot out this trope that we have a "system of checks and balances" as if this is a hack-proof system that is incorruptible. It's failing right in front of us.

I have zero issues with private companies controlling their content. Companies are regulated by laws, if there is an issue with the law, the legislative has the responsibility to change it. Instead here you have a country’s president bypassing the law making system to control a company behavior, that’s by definition an authoritative action as it goes against the separation of powers and responsibilities, which defines in part a democratic system.

Opinions regarding Trump have nothing to do with anything here.

> That protection requires that they are not editorializing content.

It doesn't. Here is its text:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

Section 230 grants sites the freedom to moderate content. You've got it exactly backwards.

First: editorializing is not prohibited. Second, moderation has always been allowed. In fact, the main thrust of 230 is to allow moderation activities taken in good faith.

Also if a mass of bipartisan support existed, I expect it would have been rolled into the last changes that modified these liability protections on the topic of sex trafficking content.

No, the truth is that this particular controversy began when the double standard arose on various social media platforms when the current administration's use of social media violated ToS yet was allowed to remain. This in turn prompted greater awareness of all such content and the extent to which it had been allowed or overlooked, resulting in efforts by social media platforms to simply enforce their own ToS.

If there is a problem with the current Twitter actions taken, it's that they continue to try & thread the needle between two opposing goals: Adhering to their own ToS and preserving their platform as something other than a cesspool, and not adhering to their ToS in a way that makes powerful interest groups angry.

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