Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

0. https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1266347307391488002

I think you are very far from reality

What facts? What alt-right fringe?

Trump was voted in by tens of millions of Americans and still has tens of millions of supporters.

> At the top management level, they are probably weighing the possibility that he never leaves office (a plausible scenario at this point)

Trump is in his 70s...

> since you don’t have the courage to write down and justify your true beliefs

What true beliefs are you hinting at here and why would they take courage to write down?

I do not agree that the scenario you're talking about is probable (which is indicated by plausible). Perhaps you mean possible? Sure, but in that case it's also possible money instantly has no meaning, there is no Congress, there are no states, there are no judges or generals, there are no prison sentences, there are no laws at all whatsoever. Nothing matters, everything is possible.

That is a sense of unpredictability a society does not trend toward no matter how ill it is.

But try to understand that completely ending all constitutional order is not how revolutions tend to progress. Even in the U.S. civil war, there were two (federal) constitutions in place for two sets of states. There was order, even in that chaos.

I agree Trump has autocratic tendencies. But he is a weak minded fool. He will not make for a strong autocrat, he even contradicts himself and dithers too much for this. He is Side Show Bob. He's a distraction. To succeed he would need a very high percentage of authority, trust, and compliance - and there's just no way he's going to get that.

I question whether he even does something to sabotage the election. On January 20th his term of office expires. At noon he is not the POTUS if there's been no election. Further, there's no House of Representatives, because their term expires on January 3rd. And 1/3 of Senators are not Senators. But at 12:01pm on January 20th, there is a person who will become POTUS without an election. And that's the President pro tempore of the Senate. Following that, the states will surely already be figuring out how to reinstitute the House through either appointments or new elections. It's not up to the federal government. But to pass new laws, including a new election to make up for the delayed one, we'll need a Congress.

That has never happened. I can tell you many examples from history, things that are way more likely than any of this. Including from American history. Some of those things are violent, even in fact violent for just one person, that are way more likely than autocracy.

Trump's best chance is for the election to proceed.

So, while you can't for sure predict what's going to happen next, just try to have some imagination for rare events that have happened rather than events that have never happened. Trump is a chickenshit asshole but that's like, the least remarkable or interesting thing going on here, because he's been a chickenshit asshole his whole life - not news! And that doesn't really highly qualify (or disqualify) him as an autocrat. He's not going to be one because he's just too incompetent and steps on his own dick every chance he gets. Just try to calm down, let him have enough rope to hang himself, and he will.

Statements like this won't get you taken seriously.

[0] https://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/#source...

Using the military to quell civil unrest means people getting shot. Last time in 1992 on the order of George HW Bush, the resulted was 50 dead and 2000 injured.

Unless a person is talking about using the military to assist with natural disasters, the person is envisioning the violence of "when the looting starts, the shooting starts".

I think much of the media (bbc, reuters, vox, cnbc, msnbc, abc, cnn, buzzfeed, huffingtonpost, twitter's leadership) basically are the propaganda arm of the anti-Trump Coup.

The use a multi-level approach to execute and to protect it:

- to keep legitimacy of their disinformation efforts, keep 10-15% of the reporting as 'neutral', and then flood the 90% of the time with anti-president message.

This tactic allows for what I call: Plausible Deniability.

When you confront these propagandists about the majority of their disinformation compaign, they point to the '10%' and then claim plausible deniability ('eg we do not do everything wrong)

- Use War propaganda tactics [2]. With emphasis on 4 (We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!) and 5 (The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention)

- instigate unrest (and there are a number of tactics to do this, as we are seeing being unrolled)

When you use the above decomposition, it is, at least for me, easy to see what is going on and why.

With regards to:

>".. Could you write down these opinions as if they were your own, without violating HN's house rules?.."

Sure. So let me re-iterate the context

Trump's tweet: >"... ....These THUGS are dishonering the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any Difficult and we will assume control, but when looting starts, the the shooting starts.

Thank you. ..."

The twitter suggests that the above is glorifying violence.

I think that an opinion, it is a wrong opinion. And leads to more violence.

I would interpret Trump's message as:

- Laws will be enforced. Help to local police is on the way (in the form of National Guard that Tim Woltz mobilized [1]).

- Physical harm to Innocent people and their property will lead to shootings.

I would interpret Twitter's handling of this as: we do not want law enforcement to enforce laws. Loot all you want, it is your right under the circumstances.

[1] https://www.newsmax.com/politics/tim-walz-george-floyd-riots...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basic_Principles_of_War_Pr...

They evaluated and rejected hiding "violates Twitter policies" content except in the rare cases where they deem it necessary for the public interest to retain that violating content behind a click barrier.

https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/offensive-tw... has more details about the current policy, and you can read their blog posts from the past couple years about these policies to gain more context and background.

edit: Adding a bit more, the people being bubbled away will likely tend to just isolate. You might think you like that idea, but having spent some time in isolation, I will attest that it kind of messes with your head. You lose your "phase lock" with society on a lot of different norms, small and large. The stereotype of the "dangerous loner", though not always fair, attests to this reality.

If you want to keep someone as a useful member of society and not a tragedy-of-the-day, you have to keep talking to them.

The only way to actually change someone is conversation.

Only those who don't want honest change fight to prevent actual conversation from happening.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ok-dude-twitter-susp...

Calling police "violent" for wanting to stop blatant opportunistic theft and terrorist behavior (e.g. deliberately cutting gas lines to create big explosions) is a stretch. I would call the initial policing incident that tipped off the protests violent, and I would call the destructive rioting violent (as opposed to the initial peaceful protesting). Both acts deserve condemnation and consequences in my view.

shouldn't public communications occur on public infrastructure?

We live in a world where a substantial number of people believe the earth is flat, that 5G cellular is a mind control scheme, that vaccines cause autism, that COVID-19 was created by a political party, that the concept of climate change is manufactured, or that major national crises are actually just actors being paid to further a political narrative.

Most of these ideas aren't new, but in decades past you might have heard about them from a conspiracy-therorist neighbor, a low profile website, or an alternative magazine with little reputation of its own.

Now, these ideas are spread on the exact same platforms as objectively truthful / scientifically sound media. Your Youtube conspiracy theory channel is right next to the BBC's videos. Your viral Facebook post could be from the New York Times, or it might be from a propaganda organization - or worse, an account that looks like a normal person but which was specifically created to spread misinformation that seems plausibly truthful.

Credibility is distributed and anyone can publish to a huge audience, which is wonderful sometimes, and othertimes deeply problematic, because the viewer often doesn't know enough to distinguish fact from fiction and can't trust the publisher at face value anymore.

Its uncharted territory. The cost to distribute is zero, and ideas spread far and wide - but that means that there are equally as many incredible sources on any given topic as credible ones, and telling the difference is hard, and sometimes not knowing the difference is dangerous. Dunning-Kruger writ large.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I think you'll quickly lean in the opposing view after reviewing those viewpoints, because if Twitter was a utility it would have been declared one at some point in the previous 11 years.

exactly. Whatever you use in warzone you're risking that the same can be used against you, thus all the conventions on warzone weapons usage and prisoner treatment. Thus all the training, so that your soldiers wouldn't cross [too frequently] the redline to trigger the response.

I remember reading for example that in WWI new young soldiers, i think in Russia, were sometimes issued old style non-flat 3-edged rifle attached combat knives. Whether the knife is flat or 3-edged wouldn't make any difference during the actual stabbing and the immediate time after that. Where it makes all the difference is outside of the immediate combat situation - those non-flat knives would make for unnecessary horrible very hard to heal wounds, and thus if you were found with such a knife on a battlefield you'd be killed right there instead of taken POW. So the older soldiers would make sure that the newbies would promptly lose the knives.

The situation is similar to hollow-point bullets - they create those horrible wounds without any tactical benefit on actual battlefield.

Military "bullets" (they're called rounds, actually) are designed to be optimized for performance in a warfare environment. That means accuracy, and range. A hollow point round is design to expand and be a stopping shot - with one round - and not continue to travel large distances, which puts other people at risk. Cops can carry those because if they're in a crowded environment firing a hollow point round at a threat means less risk to anyone else who isn't a threat.

>There are all sorts of international agreements on not using certain types of things in war - types of bullets are no exception.

Yeah no one will care about this once an actual near-peer war kicks off.

Did I understand that right?

The government does not grant rights

No one needs to do anything here. People can research and find stuff out for themselves, and come to their own conclusions.

So what?

There’s no law prohibiting these types of businesses from supporting a political candidate. They could plaster a huge “Vote For X” banner at the top of every person’s profile. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.

It’s not like Twitter is tax-exempt which would prohibit it from endorsing candidates like Churches.

It's within their rights to do take these actions, fact checks and hiding/deleting tweets, to protect their ecosystem. If it is questionably legal because it may influence the election, then I haven't seen the law it is breaking. I see a better argument for showing Twitter promoting Trump's feed to drive clicks as an in kind donation which could quickly break legal campaign donation limits.

Twitter has taken a stand here and I do think they should apply their policies evenly. Will they effectively apply this to everything or even have the capacity built out now to do so? I doubt it. They are a business who needs user engagement to drive profit from ads. If they constrain their most clicked tweets it could lower their revenue even if initially those tweets get attention for being removed.

It's not only acceptable but actually ethically correct to hold those with more power to higher standards of responsibility.

It's therefore not only acceptable but actually ethically correct to enforce these rules more proactively against the President of the United States than some Russian bot account.

Personally I think they are just trying to call out a moron. But so what if you are trying to "interfere" with the election. Corporations are allowed to interject their own beliefs and politics too

>"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This federal law preempts any state laws to the contrary: "[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section."

What about setting up a blog on whitehouse.com? Most normal people can't get the same audience, but Trump's not normal.

>If they only selective moderate accounts, then that protection may not survive in court.

Even assuming there was a service moderating by purely political guidelines, I don't see how 230 would stop applying. Otherwise, a lot of websites will be screwed. For instance, any website run by a political party that allows comments.

>that's a bigger problem, because it gives Twitter the power to shape global communications unilaterally. Something no corporation should have the power to do.

The solution to a monopoly abusing its power isn't to write piecemeal law curtailing things as they come up. The solution is to get rid of the monopoly (breaking it up, making it so competitors join the market, etc).

But this order isn't about monopolies. It's a party plank and rallying cry.

Twitter only has about 150 million daily active users. That's 1/3 of the population of the USA. There is no way in hell Twitter could ever be considered a monopoly when less than 2% of the world's population even uses their platform actively.

And Senate Republicans have openly asked judges to resign so they can be replaced by conservative judges, and their justification for why it's okay to do this so close to an election but it wasn't okay to confirm Garland so close to an election literally amounts to "Obama's a Democrat, Trump's a Republican."

Although it may mean fewer people become part of the community it would also mean that those that remain with it are now more isolated from the outside world and increase the precieved level of persecution? Would this then correlate with an increase in action?

I don't know the answer to this, it seems logical to me that each of these answers would be yes, but I definitely think it is a topic worth investigating and discussing.

Any evidence for that assertion?

I don't really even think property damage should be included in the definition of "violence" and maybe Twitter agrees with me.

She also didn't say what to burn down. Trump was very clear that looters are who he wanted shot. Burn it down is a common saying that can mean anything from literally burning stuff to just tearing down a system in order to rebuild.

No, it would not, because generally left-wing people don't spread lies with the intention to dissuade people from voting (quite to the contrary, the left wing is fighting for people to have the right and means to vote) or call for storming the White House and start shooting.

There's no hidden meaning here.

My only nit with what you said is with this: "when people are looting, it's unfortunately almost inevitable that there will be violence."

I would say that looting is violence. I would further add three things. 1. that self defense is justified when violence against your person and property is committed. 2. Even more importantly, it is the job of the police to stop these violent crimes, at gunpoint if necessary. 3. Even more tellingly, if anybody here's livelihood or home was getting looted that person would be calling the police to do their job.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/technology/trump-twitter-...

I just skimmed through that ruling, and couldn't find this. Could you cite where she ruled that twitter couldn't remove his account?

It goes on to say this can’t be possible because it would mean that conservative content would have to violate rules at 4x the rate of others, and that statistically its highly improbable. Why? It’s a known problem that Twitter has a lot of accounts that are fake accounts from bad actors trying to sow discord in the US political system, and those tend to be right leaning. Didn’t Twitter relatively recently do a purge of a large number of accounts that were deemed fake? That could easily skew the numbers, especially because those accounts tend to engage in the kind of rhetoric that gets you banned.

And then the article points to cases where liberal leaning content doesn’t get banned even though it should. I can also find cases where conservative content violates the rules yet it didn’t face consequences, most prominently the president’s account. It’s not just liberals who get a free pass, so I’m not sure what that proves.

Is it possible there is a bias in how Twitter sensors content? Sure. But that article makes it sound like they have a data driven, mathematically rigorous proof that it’s true, and I don’t think they meet that mark.

I'm not being facetious. Isn't this something the right is actually proud of? I mean, they actually boast about not being "politically correct" (something the rest of the western world calls "common decency").

> database of prominent, politically active users who are known to have been temporarily or permanently suspended from the platform. … Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump.

The Vox piece isn't an "admission" that their moderation is biased. Twitter's CEO is "admitting" that the politics of the developers is heavily liberal:

> “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” Dorsey said. “They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.”

This link doesn't say what you claim. It's Dorsey talking about the internal social environment at Twitter's offices, not Twitter's moderation policies.

I'm not sure I believe that claim. I think that looking at past history of voting fraud shows pretty conclusively that _vote by mail_ fraud has always been a very low percentage.

Sure, it's possible that _some_ fraud might happen, but looking at data from Oregon, it's happened two times in twenty years (_from my reading of the conservative database that was linked somewhere yesterday -- sorry :) -- I might be off by an order of magnitude, but it's still small_). That seems like an _extremely_ low incidence rate, and seems a small price to may for the idea that maybe more people will be likely to vote, due to not having to stand in line at polling places, deal with vote suppression efforts, or even just because it's more convenient to fill it out on your own schedule ahead of time.

Now, many will say that states like CA and other large states, who haven't had a large-scale rollout of vote-by-mail with the history and planning that Oregon had, will face more fraud than Oregon did. I think that's actually a very believable point -- we are not going to have a perfect rollout. However, I'd also like to point out that we've had two decades of electronic voting machines that have been proven to be absolutely insecure, as well as numerous cases in other states of voters who have been unable to vote because their polling places were under-staffed or closed too early.

Voting by mail is a proven method that scales well to ensure that larger portions of the populace have the opportunity to vote. It's being considered in light of wanting to limit in-person gatherings. It very unlikely that it's some conspiracy to promote fraud.

[Edit: Reading further down the discussion gives some context. That's... disturbing. Still, you are also assuming bad faith on the part of others, and that's not how things are supposed to be done on HN.]

Funny how personal bias can twist perceptions.

https://nitter.net/realDonaldTrump/status/126623110078074470...

This is not an isolated incidence of property crime. This is utter destruction more akin to waging a total war against a particular district of Minneapolis. It's a form of terrorism.

Property -- in the form of business and services -- is essential to life. There is no absolute distinction between the two, despite what some pretend. These people are breaking property in their own community and then expect investors or the very government they're protesting to step back in and rebuild.

I don't understand the modern desire to excuse theft. Theft is a form of terrorism; it is not okay, and is really high up there on the list of serious crimes that damage society.

... and were left alone for weeks, or more. Given some slaps on the wrist. And the tax payer footed the bill for the cleanup.

What else do you think might get this kind of attention? Fact is, incidents like this have been happening for a long, long time, yet nothing changes.

Oh, and I want a perp walk. All the usual stuff that happens to other people. And then it's time to talk about the doctrine of qualified immunity and a whole lot of other things.

They were already evading justice before the video came out (the internal police analysis was obviously false). Pantaleo was never charged for Garner's death. In other cases we have seen video evidence excluded from trial and officers walk.

I'm not remotely confident that this will lead to convictions.

If I shot someone on video[0], I would be charged with a crime, likely homicide, that day and in jail until a bail hearing. At which point I might have the option to leave jail until my trial.

In this case the officer was arrested 3 days later (about an hour ago at time of writing), and only due to pressure from both citizens and politicians. Without that, it may have taken longer to charge him, or he may not have been charged at all, just like the other multiple times this officer killed someone.

That's a double standard. The police should serve the people, not be above them or immune to oversight.

[0]: A white person, if I shot a black person, the DA's office might try to cover it up and I'd only get arrested a month later after protests: https://www.nytimes.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-georg...

Stop equating property with life. They're not the same. They're not even close.

I know this may be a difficult thing to accept for some people on this site, since it is at its core a tech investment site, but no amount of financial damage would be "proportional" to systemic excusal of murder.

> A restaurant caught in the crossfire of unrest in Minneapolis Thursday night has sent a powerful message to its followers on social media: “Let my building burn.”

https://www.facebook.com/111805205582613/posts/3030378453725...:

> Sadly Gandhi Mahal has caught fire and has been damaged....Don’t worry about us, we will rebuild and we will recover. This is Hafsa, Ruhel’s daughter writing, as I am sitting next to my dad watching the news, I hear him say on the phone; “ let my building burn, Justice needs to be served, put those officers in jail”. Gandhi Mahal May have felt the flames last night, but our firey drive to help protect and stand with our community will never die! Peace be with everyone.

But history can be important. Literally everything that's known and has been done is now history, including recently committed crimes.

The history that we're talking about still has clearly identifiable painful consequences in present-day communities, so it's not something that can just be filed away and ignored as no longer relevant.

Many of the immigrants who have created new businesses in the US have experienced terrible histories themselves, but they have been able to put these behind them, because their antagonists are not in the US.

I don't think historic injustices should be simply ignored, but the problem is even more severe when the systemic abuses your community is experiencing is not only in the past, not only occurring in the moment, but there is realistic prospect that conditions will to improve.

Private companies militarizing police forces never face liability, and sworn, armed officers belong to unions, and neither of those seems on a course to changing.

It is a completely untenable situation for American citizens to be extra-judiciously killed by government employees. Rioting doesn't help, peaceful protests don't help, you can't even respectfully kneel during the national anthem without being treated as though you're rejecting everything about the country. Petitions? Hunger strikes? Self-immolation?

> Noor was ultimately arrested and charged with second-degree manslaughter and third-degree murder following an eight-month investigation by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Hennepin County Attorney's Office. In April 2019, Noor was convicted of third-degree murder and manslaughter, but acquitted of intentional second-degree murder. In June 2019, Noor was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison.

It seems like the system ended up working to a degree, at least putting the murderer behind bars. So why would one expect significant protests?

The outrage in these cases isn't over a white cop killing a black person per se, it's that the system immediately moves to protect the murderers because they're cops. Rather than arresting the criminal, fellow corrupt cops were stationed outside of his house to protect him. That the main perp has finally been charged is a product of the protests rather than the justice system moving slowly - witness that the conspirators have yet to be charged. Anyone who believes in law and order should be sympathetic to the protestors, even in spite of race.

Furthermore, ascribing the motives of a few looters onto the whole protest is ridiculous. Especially as at least some of that destruction was led by agents provocateurs.

Again, the rioting isn't a good thing, but it's understandable.

That shooting wasn't part of a system of institutional and deep rooted racism. Neither was it part of a system where white cops routinely harass black people with no basis other than the colour of their skin; where white cops use horrifyingly excessive violence and all too often murder black suspects, bystanders and innocents - a system where the perpetrators of that violence and murder are almost guaranteed to face no repercusions at all. A system of ingrained inquality that spans decades.

Black people are harassed, racially abused, set upon and shot frequently by white cops in the USA - and the videos we see pretty much on a daily basis in the news and on twitter are only the tip of the iceberg.

As someone in the UK, the the inequality and racism that still exists in the USA, "land of the free", is mind boggling, sickening even. Something has to change, so yes, I can fully understand protests and rioting.

Also, when people complain about MSM they are including Fox and Sinclair.

Please don't insult my intelligence again.

Agreed for sure on the second point. They turned everybody into publishers with global reach and still haven't really thought about what previous publishers did to make sure that power was used responsibly.

Politicians and other organizations will work to offer up an alternative platform where they won't be censored.

These are literally the most powerful people in the world.

EDIT: Oh look, downvote brigade has arrived.