Twitter has applied warning labels to 37% of Trump's tweets since polls closed | Hacker News Reader

Twitter has applied warning labels to 37% of Trump's tweets since polls closed

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108 pointsvinnyglennon87 comments

He's literally lying at this point and putting the democratic system of the US in jeopardy by saying he "won by a lot". Terminate his account. He doesn't have a right to post dangerous falsehoods on a third-party platform.

I'm wondering if there are any legal implications to the harm he's done, in terms of division and decreasing trust in the democracy.

Dorsey has said that much of what Trump says on the platform is newsworthy, and therefore Twitter allows it. Were they to suspend Trump’s account, it would necessarily be because his Tweets are no longer newsworthy. I can’t see that happening.

I think once he's no longer president he'll have a very difficult time maintaining a Twitter account in good standing.

> He's literally lying at this point and putting the democratic system of the US in jeopardy

That was a true statement for the past 4 years.

It is pretty unreal, something like 1 out of 4 of his tweet were hidden, at some point you'd think they would disable his account but that would probably put them in a dangerous position.

They'll likely disable his account on January 21, 2021 when he's no longer POTUS.

The stance they've taken is that as President they won't ban or delete tweets because they're matters of record.

There have been a lot of hints that after he's officially out the ban hammer is in play again.

Has there been discussion of Twitter/Facebook using different techniques like tweet delays (quadratic backoff?)?

Twitter has confirmed that Trump's Twitter account will lose its special privileges re rule violations after he leaves office: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/11/06/twitter-wont-...

Now would be a good time to suspend the account on numerous repeated violations. You've never seen any account which was given as much slack as this one.

As POTUS his tweets are still matters of public record. More likely it will be locked in January.

It's entertaining how many posts that report the results of the election are getting flagged off the front page at the moment.

Politics is generally considered off-topic on HN unless it's "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon"[0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't like what you are implying, I voted for Biden and I'm happy about the result and I DO NOT want to see these posts here.

I come to HN to discuss tech with techies.

I can have arguments about politics anywhere else on the net. They go sideways here just as quickly and they don't belong.

Why doesn’t your comment contradict itself? You say you don’t want to see posts or talk about it on here, but you obviously decided to go through the comments.

I can think of two reasons why his account is not banned: 1) The tweets will be used as evidence in the upcoming litigation. Fines and/or jail are (likely?) in his future. 2) The public is likely to learn in real time of any no-good, really bad, horrible decisions on his way out the door.

Why is your post not hidden? Are you going to jail?

I don't approve of any type of censorship.

Don't care if it's neo-nazis, islamic jihadists, cult-like evangelical christians, militant atheists, or the President.

All ideas should be allowed. Specific calls for action of violence/killing should be restricted, but Trump isn't doing that. I don't know why people think this is ok.

Bannon went straight to calls for violence .. and got banned entirely.

> All ideas should be allowed. Specific calls for action of violence/killing should be restricted

Um...

You can say that gay lifestyles are against God's will (OK) without saying people should punish gays for being gay (BAD)... note that I am an atheist have neither of these beliefs it's just an example

It gets blurry as to what is specifically a direct call for violence versus "plain old hate speech".

I'm all for nuance, but I can't imagine this being the hill people want to die on RE: censorship. As long as the calls for violence aren't overt we're cool with them? I might be in the minority but I don't have a problem lumping plain old hate speech in with inciting violence. I'm trying to imagine the best possible take on what Trump is trying to do by tweeting incendiary misinformation and I just can't get there.

I'm not advocating for censorship, I'm simply pointing out that it's not so simple as to say that if there is no direct incitement to violence, that said speech is "acceptable".

Ongoing dehumanization of "others" is dangerous territory and needs to be acknowledged as such.

I think the closest solution is "cancel culture" (hate that term) where the general market rejects the offering but it's still allowed for "fairness".

Oh I agree with you, I was referring to the person you were replying to. The idea that a private company making decisions about users on their platform is censorship is ridiculous to begin with. 1 in 10 Americans use Twitter, to say that Twitter is even capable of censoring the president, even if had they would disable his account permanently, would be laughable.

What exactly do you think the end result will be if his supporters believe that the election "was stolen from them"? Give me a break.

It's harmless unless the Supreme Court believes it. I believed the 2004 election was stolen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXyl_YNA8Hs

I didn't feel the need to do violence because I'm a reasonable person. I listen to the other side and try to understand where they're coming from. We need more of that and less fear of ideas. Maybe things wouldn't be so polarized if we did more of that.

The rules of the world, of democracy, are only made possible through human belief in them. Indoctrinating a large group of people with false/misleading information to try to weaken/de legitimize the rules and systems of democracy will more or less lead to breaking of them, at that point who cares what the supreme court believes, it probably won't have any effect, the damage is already done. I wish we had an educated, critical thinking, rationality driven humanity but the fact is a majority of them (on either side) are not but right now, only one side (not even most of R's, just Trump and his hardcore fans) is trying to weaken the democratic process by lying.

Exactly. A perhaps pertinent point here is that Mao's revolution in China had less than 3% of the working class people behind it, by their own polling (Mentioned in Tony Cliff's works on marxists.org).

A revolution can be led by a minority, and almost always is, you don't need a majority you just need power, force of will, and either a distraction for the ruling forces, or enough people in the ruling forces to turn a blind eye (As with Castro -- who got the middle classes on-side first to support the revolution, and then took power while they were feuding among themselves)

Isn't that more than a bit paternalistic? Who gets to decide what people can believe about the election? You? Give people the facts, and let them come to their own conclusions.

>You? This is unnecessary.

Why? Parent poster was making a judgement as to what people should be allowed to believe, and they didn't point to any authority or why that authority should be in charge. How do we know the parent poster doesn't consider themselves to be a good enough authority to decide? They seem to present themselves as one.

What do you think the end result will be if talk is off the table?

Considering the relative fitness of each 'side' here, I would expect any sensible progressive to be doing everything in their power to let their opposition air their grievances verbally.

I'd have thought the likelihood of somebody dying is far greater from these tweets, than shouting fire in a theatre.

@dang could you consider not allowing one sided political narrative on HN ?

Is this one-sided?

Doesn't that actually make his tweets stand out even more? Like how putting parental advisory warnings made a cd/album even more desirable. Or how a banned books list is a form of advertising and draws more interest to the banned books.

And lets not forget the streisand effect. How many people are now actually going to trump's twitter just to view the "bad tweets" now?

Everyone here understands the streisand effect/etc here but fail to see how it also applies to trump. Trump is literally using hate/opposition as a form of free advertising. He is using hate/opposition to drive traffic to his twitter account. It's unbelievable when you think about it.

No, because now the contents of the tweet are hidden until you explicitly choose to view them rather than just showing up unsolicited, and more importantly, because tweets flagged in this manner no longer show up in feeds.

You would have to visit his twitter account to even know that the tweets exist, and you would have to click on each tweet individually to view it, and to waive the warning label, so you would already have to have the intent to view them.

Thus, the Streisand Effect doesn't apply.

> Thus, the Streisand Effect doesn't apply.

Must be why we are not talking about it.

Does that make a difference for most Trump supporters? I would expect that they'd be hearing about his pronouncements from Facebook or Fox News.

Twitter provides an amplification of Trump’s falsehoods through the ease of retweeting. With the warnings, retweeting is impossible, which dampens the spread of misinformation. Every bit counts. The typical right wing only platforms don’t have the same reach as Twitter - not even close.

Twitter also put a disclaimer on a U.S. Senator who was quoting Kentucky Democrat Ed Pritchard https://twitter.com/Peoples_Pundit/status/132478060579671654... and blocked a tweet from @marklevinshow that merely articulated Art. II, §1, cl. 2 of the United States Constitution!

I don't see a disclaimer?

I don't see a disclaimer; but anyway, it's incredibly naive to treat that tweet as anything but innuendo on the integrity of this year's elections.

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