Twitter appears to have removed the president's last two tweets
twitter.com
twitter.com
You'd have to be extremely shortsighted or naive to think this is a good thing.
Every day, many here are screaming zuckerburg is evil, twitter is horrible, break up tech companies. And yet the same people are celebrating these tech companies censoring a government official.
But of course you don't really believe it. Just spewing hyper partisan bullshit.
Also, in his censored tweets, he was asking his supporters to go home peacefully. So more like defusing the situation rather than igniting it.
But regardless, you'd have to be an idiot to support a bunch of unelected tech elites censoring elected government officials. Whether it is democrat or republican or independent, sane people would say it's not for the tech elites to decide which politician gets to say what.
For all the talk about "democracy", those purporting to support it sure love censorship and authoritarianism.
Are you only now realizing we're fucked? We have the most Corona virus death rates of any country in the world, our stature in the world has never been lower, China is making deals with EU [1] and Asia, leaving out the US, Russia is hacking us with impunity and offering bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan, ... I could go on and and on. We were fucked 4 years ago when we elected a president whose solve qualification is that he is a white supremacist. It will take us many years to unfuck ourselves.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/business/china-eu-investm...
Break Twitter, Facebook, and Google up. NEVER AGAIN!
At worst, he’s fomenting violent revolution.
Basically Twitter for people who believe in democratic institutions and Parler for others. Here Trump clearly posted a Parler message on Twitter.
It's ridiculous that people are actually trying to argue that the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth has no effective way to communicate with the public outside of Twitter.
Obama is just one president in a sea of 45 presidents over the course of 231 years. They all managed just fine without tech companies, and Trump will manage to find a way.
Besides whitehouse.gov, which he should've been using, he has no other way to quickly, directly communicate to any constituent that wants to see his message.
Oh wait...
When the left does it, even if they're hyper violent, it's called a peaceful protest. When the right does it, it's a coup and insurrection.
Yeah right.
Wait, the left forcibly occupied the Capitol at the behest of the defeated candidate with the overt goal of using threat of violence to get the election results disregarded?
When?
You can grasp the next "fact": that the Trumpites were peaceful, this was an Antifa false flag operation (you can find doctored evidence of this on Twitter). If you can lie to yourself about that, then you can go to sleep at night feeling that you're the moral one, that you're the one still on the correct side of humanity...
He is the President of the most powerful country in the world. He could call a news conference and make himself available to the people. Those who wish to hear what he has to say can come, listen, and cover his story.
Furthermore, whitehouse.gov is accessible to everyone. RSS is a thing.
We live in the information age, why is it so hard for a newspaper to add "example.com/news/1234/sources" to the bottom of the article to give us a nice little Harvard format list of references to all the claims they make?
If you're saying that this particular message shouldn't have been cancelled, different discussion.
But you literally have a mob which stormed and broke into the capitol of the US, with armed guns, and explosives being found, all of which directly linked to the president lying for weeks, instigating things and calling on his followers to rise up, now obviously resulting in risk of violence and at least one person getting shot in the neck. The notion that such lies should continue to be freely posted on a platform that has basic rules in place just because it's the president, is insane. If the president is insane and it's causing violence, you can't just sit back. (insert obligatory WWII/Hitler reference if you will)
Lastly, he has plenty of communication channels. What's scary is if a private company like Twitter or any other news outlet got forced to publish whatever the current person in power wanted to say on their platform.
I wanted to see what he said that was so bad it had to be removed. But I couldn't, and I didn't know where else to look. So I'm left in the dark. I had the know-how to go to Parlor, but not everyone does. It just seems unfair that tech companies get to decide if the average Joe gets to see a message from the President or not. Trump should have normalized posting his messages on whitehouse.gov or something to avoid this.
Somebody must to do the job, and republican party was clearly useless for that.
Not censoring him before has lead to this insanity, a woman killed today and thousands of really misguided people that will end in jail. Fortunately they were white and the police got confused whereas deciding between friend or foe; I don't think that the outcome would have been so restrained in case of a majority of black people trying to assault the capitol.
* Disclaimer was: "This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can't be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence"
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for this. Here is a screenshot of the removed tweet: https://d.pr/i/Ex15UI/ABdSwruLJz
Edit: If you're going to downvote me, I welcome an open conversation about why I might be wrong.
> These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!
(By searching portions you should be able to confirm that this is accurate -- please let me know if I mistyped.
This is the link; it's probably cached somewhere, too https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469549709107077...)
> As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy.
> This means that the account of @realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours following the removal of these Tweets. If the Tweets are not removed, the account will remain locked.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1346970430062485505
I think any neutral party will see a narrative that’s being set and an opposite narrative that’s being disallowed.
I cannot predict what the Biden admin will do, but it behooves the Biden admin to not let these outlets determine what narratives are allowed and which ones aren’t.
Biden is an old style liberal, if he ignores these orgs and let’s them set agendas, it’ll come to bite him (ala Red Guards vs PLA -I bet he’s old enough to recall that)
This is a pandora's box.
>Where would you draw the line?
no line. representatives have chosen not to represent their constituents, at a certain point it needs to be clear that if you can't keep your promises, ignore the needs and concerns of the public while holding them in contempt, this is the only possible outcome. censorship cannot solve this problem, only effective governance can.
It was probably advisable to censor his tweets if Twitter didn't want their more easily angered users to turn against them, but they were by no means compelled to do anything.
I understand that you intend that to read as "do you think people should be allowed to yell 'fire!' in a crowded room in which there is no fire", but for every false positive punished you create a chance for a false negative to arise from people to afraid to speak up for fear of getting it wrong.
"This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence"
But they must have realised that admitting the posts are likely to stoke violence while not removing them was a bad look
More to the point, your right to free speech isn’t a constraint on the private companies right to exercise theirs.
And even more to the point, @realDonaldTrump is (and has been described as such by its owner in court cases) a official communication tool of the Office of the President; it trumping the preferences of private media firm by whose resources it is relayed would be a direct, government violation of the right of free speech/press.