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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

If Donald Trump, the individual, would be treated like an ordinary user he'd probably already been kicked off the platform.

The president of the US as an office has public, secure communication channels, Donald Trump, having signed the same TOS like anyone else, should be treated like everyone else. Not exactly sure why Twitter feels the need to be apologetic about how they moderate their platform.

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This! So very much, this! He’s not tweeting from the Twitter officially recognized @potus account; he’s doing so from the same account he registered as a regular citizen years ago.

This account should receive no special privileges. It’s asinine that Twitter ignores their own rules just to appease this man.

He drives a lot of traffic to their site

Exaclty, I don't know how many times I've heard mention of Trump's Tweets in the news and elsewhere.

if they cared about being on the right side of history, which apparently they do, if only for a "inadvertently limited" amount of time, they would forget about the traffic. That traffic is from mostly people people better off not being (a part of you engagement)

Our nation is built on open discourse. One could argue that rather than silence opposition, one could inform the population. The "mother and father know best" attitude helps no one and fosters doubt into the integrity of things

Isn't twitter doing exactly that by labeling each tweet explaining the lie(s) it contains?

The last four years are damning evidence that the so-called "Marketplace of Ideas" is mostly just a petri dish for Fascism.

The fact no one wants to accept in this context is that markets need to be regulated or else they get taken over by snake oil salesmen and racketeers.

Open discourse doesn’t mean giving everyone a platform.

Once a single voice is reaching enough people, I would argue that increasing the distribution of their words will on average decrease the amount of discourse. Almost no replies will be heard by a super-celeb, and it's hard to have a meaningful conversation with anyone else in the morass of replies.

>That traffic is from mostly people people better off not being (a part of you engagement)

I disagree. Given that many of those folks have not only continued to engage with the soon-to-be ex-POTUS, even to the extent that they are happy to be suckers...err......donors to his grift[0]...err.."Election Defense Fund", I'd think that Twitter would want to keep those folks around -- the more gullible someone is, the more likely they'll click on ads and generate revenue.

And advertisers stand to make money on conversions, assuming those folks haven't already given all their money to the Trump "Election Defense" con...err...fundraising drive.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-fundra...

IMO, in all societies ever, we're not equal individuals and we shouldn't be treated alike. Some people are more important, and to pretend that the President of the US is the same as random Joe down the street is delusional. It would be just as bizarre to imagine that Xi Jinping is the same as random Chinese TikTok makeup artist.

Pretty sure that was a point early in his presidency where he was block, but Twitter being a US company was not allow to block the US president....?

Nope, no laws like that here. This was a Twitter decision.

Ironically, the 1st Amendment protects Twitter's ability to block anything that it likes.

Fundamentally, the government can't dictate what anybody chooses to publish (or not) on a website that they own. They can seize it and prosecute the owners if the content is illegal, but they can't force editorial decisions.

This whole arrangement drove a lot of traffic to Twitter and helped to keep it relevant; they just didn't want to kill their golden goose.

> Pretty sure that was a point early in his presidency where he was block, but Twitter being a US company was not allow to block the US president....?

IIRC, there was a lawsuit that ruled that the president was not allowed to block other twitter users. As far as I know, it would still be totally withing twitter's right to block Trump, if it wanted. But I think they don't because what he says on Twitter reveals important information about his character.

It isn't just Trump who gets special treatment. A lot of crazy people with blue check marks who get special privileges. After all, isn't that the kind of internet you want? Where certain people you agree with have privileges over everyone you disagree with?

Also, the president generally gets special privileges on media platforms because he is the president. That's just common sense.

Assuming you are american, I can't believe there are people actually advocating for big tech to censor the president. It just sounds insane to me that anyone would support such an idea.

What has he really done to merit being kicked off the platform? He just types in all caps and posts 50 times a day.

Covid Misinformation and abuse seem most obvious, given that the platform has already removed Infowars and Alex Jones, whose content Trump at times ad verbatim retweeted. Here's a fairly long list[1] of public figures having been kicked off the platform for I suppose similar behaviour. I think even Trump Jr was suspended at one point.

Didn't Twitter even explicitly carve out an exemption for 'political figures'? Which let's be honest means Trump.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_no...

Id have to see specific examples as this is pretty vague. And I believe Dorsey said himself that misinformation is not against the Twitter rules (might have an exception for certain topics though). Probably because half the users on the site would be kicked off in a year.

Also think we need to be careful about the term "misinformation" as that can at times mean my opinion vs your opinion. For instance Fauci flipped on masks several times (im not hating on the guy)...but which time was it misinformation and not misinformation? This is exactly why people need to be entitled to their opinions in a free expression form. You can direct the conversation without kicking people off and censoring people. Another example is Twitter completely flopping when censoring the NY Post "misinformation" which turned out to be undeniably true.

I just read the Wikipedia Twitter suspension list. It's alarming - many of the reasons for the suspensions were false, if not absurd, and those suspensions should never have happened in the first place.

It's like snowflakes run amok at a major media platform.

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