The account of realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours
twitter.com
twitter.com
You could, however, try to develop a legal and moral framework for acceptable social media behavior (meaning the way the network itself works, not users' behavior). The particularities that make extreme content rise to the top should be banned/discouraged, rather than embraced in the race for engagement.
Also making some of the support the social media platform clearly have for some candidates as "in kind" political contributions.
This is even better, how do we do that instead?
They both cause more problems than they solve.
Most large companies (especially in regulated industries) have strict social media policies, e.g. preventing employees from performing company business via their personal social media accounts, with penalties for serious breaches being disciplinary action up to and including dismissal, i.e. it is possible to separate company business from non-company business. Why not the same for those working in the political sphere?
Businesses fear liability. Governments should be built on it.
Taking twitter away from congressmen won't stop superpatriotsforbaldeagles.ru from distributing political propaganda, or random people being fed extreme media each inside their bubble.
The issue is inflammatory content spreading like wildfire, and direct intervention from politicians themselves is just tiny drop in the ocean.
What does this actually mean? Are you trying to ask politicians not to engage in politics? News organisations? Billionaires? Foreign intelligence services? Asking for legal restrictions on who's allowed to speak about what?
And to clarify, this is actually a really important question because it predicates the entire discourse of separating social media and networks from politics.
If there is someone wanting to believe the earth is flat and triangular you will find him fast now. What could take months with massive people gatherings and paper press 100 years ago it can be done within minutes now.
Instead of banning maybe educating people on how to consume information could be a way to start. I guess it is almost impossible to educate everybody but it has empirically worked for me and my close environment, after years of educating some of my older relatives I have been able to at least make them read the links before sharing them.
Newspapers has this power before. Arguablying more so as there are Twitter alternatives and people can move platforms quickly as we saw with reddit and thedonald.win
I guessing it was easier to control before as there were narrow corridors of power to owners/govt.
Give enough people you agree with a platform, demote the ones you don't, and boom you've created a narrative without your hand putting pen to paper.
What's more, media can then report "John Doe is allegedly a domestic abuser," citing the tweets as evidence that there are allegations that John Doe is a domestic abuser. You see this pattern with pizza gate (some dumb social media posts getting picked up by Republican news), and with Kyle Rittenhouse (dumb, false twitter posts picked up by left-leaning news). In the latter case, the news outlets have been getting sued for defamation because the reporting was damaging and so demonstrably false.
Section 230 protection for these platforms erodes all standards of truth for news.
You can of course sue for any reason but winning is another matter.
(It's easier if the defendant is not a public figure, but still, in general, it's relatively hard to win libel suits in the US.)
In fact IMO it's even worse - unlike newspapers which would at least be embarrassed by blatant mis-reporting, sensationalist and fantastical stories are a major source of profits for social media, and they've got incentives to encourage and promote them.
Yes, most mainstream publications do strive for truthfulness (fortunately) but it's not really a requirement for 1st amendment protection and I'm sure we can think of fairly mainstream news outlets that don't let the truthfulness responsibility cramp their style too much.
Ironically, given all his complaining, if Section 230 didn't exist, Twitter would have no choice but to ban Trump. He'd be an absolute nightmare in terms of liability.
Striking the right balance could easily take 20+ years, but social media is here to stay.
The only way to avoid this is to permit ALL content (which we have decided is untenable), or somehow precisely censor as much on one side as the other (which is impossible).
If one "side" is breaking rules about promoting violence, and the other is not, they are not being censored or repressed- they are just breaking rules and their content will be removed.
In the US we seem to feel its ingrained that there has to be two (and only two) binary "sides" in opposition to one another. This is the minority case around the world. Things get a lot thornier when you have a whole bunch of different sides that tend to be focused around a narrow view of issues.
Correct, and it was recognized how important their role was, there were/are laws specifically covering what they could say about political subjects, whether they had to grant opposing views a platform, etc.
None of that exists for the newer platforms today.
It’s like saying we should not have let news to be carried over the internet.
In this case I am purely talking about the latter - the fact that to keep up with what the president says I have to agree to a private company's terms of service, privacy policy (which is against my interest) and have to put up with my personal data being exploited for advertising, the advertising itself and various dark patterns.
Point being is that the social media experiment and the wild west days of the internet writ large has run its course. We’ve had our fun and money has been made and lost and made again and again and again and the writing is on the wall I’m afraid.
If history is any evidence the gravy train is about to come to a glaring and disastrous end. Legislation will be passed, examples will be made by the powers at be and society will look back through the lens of history at these past 30-40 years as a cautionary tale.
To your point: There is already a huge body of law that exists that would not take much retooling to apply. Held back by the voluminous pedantic arguments entertained ad nauseam. However the blood is there in droves and now the powers at be have had the chaos special delivered on a silver platter. Its one thing for us to comment and argue in the safe confines of our little luxury bubbles the internet provides, its another thing to watch in casual horror when the death toll numbers get so large as to be incomprehensible to many and then continue those same arguments to no effect. But make no mistake reality is what refuses to go away when you choose to stop believing in it and the reality is that for the first time as of yesterday the powers at be have had their bubbles burst as a result of their collective negligence and blood has been delivered as a direct result to their door.
As if 350k people dead isn't enough, theres a tyrannical despot once again guilty of treason on national tv for all to see that this time has literally instigated a coup with blood on congress floors as a result. Fueled specifically by social media and the internet. Sure things may have seemed ephemeral and hard to legislate before because hey its the internet and its on a cute little screen, but no more.
I expect the laws to be written, applied and enforced the same way they always have been. And I expect the piles of anti- trust cases to encounter not much friction now and as for social media... i expect that it will be fine as long as it doesn't get too big and crosses that pernicious threshold where it ever again is able to be a real threat to the powers at be.
Modern social media does it faster but it's no different than the newspaper empires of yesteryear.
The report warns that social media “are now tilting dangerously toward illiberalism” as more governments and “unscrupulous partisan operatives” use social media for repressive purposes. These include not only malign propaganda campaigns at home and abroad, but also growing government use of social media for mass surveillance. “As a result of these trends,” Freedom House reports, “global internet freedom declined for the ninth consecutive year in 2019.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2019/11/07/evidence-...
It's the virality and the engagement algorithms that boost reactionary content.
They've weaponized dopamine.
The speed, algorithms, engagement, etc of modern social media is entirely unprecedented, and makes it an entirely new problem we have to deal with.
Or better yet, just set up your own blog on your own host and do whatever you want.
This is one conceivable kind of legislation that doesn't run afoul of the first amendment. Another approach might be to require social networks to interoperate so consumers can choose between different networks. I should be able to leave Twitter without leaving my network. In this way, Twitter (et al) loses a lot of its power and thus its ability to threaten democracy.
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
The only way for the service to be a dumb pipe is to not involve any kind of promotion or ranking algorithms to it, other than spam filtering. In other words, you can't have a dynamic high quality forum that is open to the public, with focus on the best content displayed first, and also be a dumb pipe. To prevent all moderation and ranking based on quality and opinion would quickly turn most sites into pure trash.
It is unreasonable to apply such regulations to anything but the actual dumb pipe, the internet connection (net neutrality).
Federation is indeed a much better choice. Allows the host to still set a quality standard on their server, and is at the same time free from gatekeepers. See Mastodon, Matrix, etc. Go to whichever host will accept you, talk to anybody willing to talk to you, and bans only kick you off specific servers.
No regulation needed.
Pedantry. My point was that these online services enjoy protections ordinary citizens (and other institutions) don't enjoy: they can choose what information people see even if it is illegal or factually incorrect and they are protected from any consequences.
> The only way for the service to be a dumb pipe is to not involve any kind of promotion or ranking algorithms to it, other than spam filtering. In other words, you can't have a dynamic high quality forum that is open to the public, with focus on the best content displayed first, and also be a dumb pipe. To prevent all moderation and ranking based on quality and opinion would quickly turn most sites into pure trash.
Right, so if Twitter (or whomever) wants to remain relevant (not become "pure trash" as you artfully put it), they need to own the consequences of their content curation. For the purpose of public good, I don't care much whether Twitter becomes an irrelevant dumb pipe or a responsible--and thus valuable--public service. Note that we needn't accept the law as-is; we could also change the exception from "dumb pipe" to "transparency of curation" to introduce a third option: Twitter can curate content how it likes but it must divulge its process.
> Federation is indeed a much better choice. Allows the host to still set a quality standard on their server, and is at the same time free from gatekeepers. See Mastodon, Matrix, etc. Go to whichever host will accept you, talk to anybody willing to talk to you, and bans only kick you off specific servers. No regulation needed.
How do you get to a federated world without regulation? Do you think 2021 or 2022 is going to be The Year of Mastodon like every year hereto has been The Year of The Linux Desktop? I.e., the "Free Market" is going to pack up and leave their existing networks on Twitter et al and move to federated alternatives? Regulation is needed to ensure fair competition; to prevent social media companies from holding your social network hostage ("if you want to communicate with your friends, you must go through us and whatever shady agreements we require you to make, and we may not even hold up our end of those agreements").
To be clear, these solutions have various tradeoffs--my point isn't that any or all of these are the right solution, but merely that if I can think of half a dozen approaches that bypass free speech laws then we should be able to work something out.
I can think of union busting to protect national security / economy ... (air traffic controllers...) ... COVID shutdowns to protect health.
The number of voices on twitter is the rhyme: Hearst and a small number of people controlled the message back then. Twitter bears responsibility, but they are ultimately not editorializing everybody all the time.
> “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
The failure of Twitter isn't active editorializing or the lack thereof.
The failure of Twitter is to not provide the necessary affordances in its design, its functionality, its business model, its values, its policies, its mission and its vision that allows a userbase of over a billion people to self-govern itself in a way that helps prevent what happened yesterday.
... and that's absolutely, undeniably a failure to think about the consequences of the product that Twitter has pushed into the world for the past 15 years.
... and it's not only a failure. It's a failure lost in it's own pure and utter banality.
Twitter isn't free of from criticisms. It's not a force of nature or the universe that disrupted lives in unfortunate ways. It's a product designed with a clear intent by humans for other humans. And therein lies the responsibility of Twitter, and everyone who provides a soapbox for others, to which it should be held accountable.
History doesn't repeat itself unless we repeat - remember, reflect, rehash, re-tell - history. And we do that from a place of empathy and understanding. Everything else is inconsequential.
Assuming that line of thinking, where'e the root cause, and when should it have been identified?
I've been on twitter since literally day two (I'm user 1018 or something like that). It was a farce back in the day: people talking about cats is my clearest memory. Ev posted on the Odeo blog and I checked it out. I remember the fail whale days.
At that point, it was a struggling start up with a start up tech stack.
At what point specifically did Twitter jump the shark and should have reinvented itself? It's an honest question and not rhetorical. It's easy to Monday morning quarterback its entire existence and call for self governance for a corporate product. It's harder to point to where and when and how that should have happened.
If we can have _that_ discussion, we can inform future twitters, which I agree is a very worthwhile cause. Otherwise, your comments sound eloquent, but ultimately are devoid of any utility.
Edit: Also, just now noticed your username... the analogy was not intentional in that regard. :-P
I've been there since early 2007.
> Assuming that line of thinking, where'e the root cause, and when should it have been identified?
Strip away the trimmings and the technology of any platform - including Twitter - and what do you have?
One or several hosts organizing an event, opening the doors and inviting people to join.
It doesn't matter if there are 5, 500, 5 million or 500 million attendees. As soon as you open those doors, you bear a responsibility to ensure that the event doesn't devolve in abuse and violence.
In the digital world, that means you think about community governance, including moderation. It also means that, as more and more people join, you are aware of the diversity in opinions they bring. It means you delegate moderation, but - more importantly - you design, evolve and build your platform in a way that helps people.
It also - most importantly - means you actually listen and acknowledge the feedback people give.
Literally none of this was new. Digital forums, chatrooms, first gen social media like MySpace, newsgroups, mailing lists and comment sections already existed in 2005. The challenges and the expertise to manage an online discussions existed at the time.
Even before that, the challenges, pitfalls and dangers of providing a soapbox to an audience - any audience - were all too well known.
> It's harder to point to where and when and how that should have happened.
From day one.
I've read Nick Bilton's Hatching Twitter. The founders of Twitter had lofty ambitions about re-inventing the Web. But as soon as Twitter started gaining a bit of traction, they devolved in arguments, rows and petty politics.
I've seen how the platform re-invented itself a few times. I've been disillusioned with the subsequent redesigns. Most notably, how Twitter all but entirely closed it's API towards 3rd party developers, killing off a budding, vibrant ecosystem of enthusiasts that did build tools that filled in holes which Twitter didn't fill.
The reality of the matter is that few people - including Twitter - have been up front about what Twitter has always been: a plain business just like the next. With a clear profit motive. Never a community "for the people, by the people".
Twitter has been a business from the day it was conceived. It started off as a product within a business context (Odeo). It was conceived within a context where any idea that caught the slightest of attention immediately became shoe-horned in a business model from the get-go.
Never mind the consequences, the impact or long term strategies.
> If we can have _that_ discussion, we can inform future twitters, which I agree is a very worthwhile cause.
Oh, but we do inform "future twitters".
It's called education, schooling and upbringing. It's in passing on values and morals to future generations. It's instilling in younger generations basic notions about respect, empathy, learning to listen, restraint, civics and so on.
Twitter doesn't equate nor facilitate the public debate. It has commoditized the public debate and leveraged it to sell marketing and advertising services.
All the lofty talk from @Jack about nothing intruding into the public debate simply doesn't do away with the fact that actively investing in a platform that allows healthy community growth has always been seen for what it was: a cost that was perceived to outweigh the benefits.
That's the banality of evil at it's heart. Simply not recognizing that your own actions have very real consequences in the real world. Even when it's pointed out plainly to you.
I don't think so. The analogy that comes to mind is the idea of letting kids play outside. People try to justify today's overprotective culture by bringing up things like cars (they existed back in the 70s too) or candy-wielding abductors (really?) or whatever, but the overall theme is this pervasive idea that we can't handle scary things (be it the outdoors or media megacorps) and therefore we should be artificially shielded from them.
Instead, wouldn't it be better to teach critical thinking in school such that when you're faced with the realities of the world, you have at least some preparation? The idea of imparting civic responsibility principles from a young age seems to work well for example with classroom cleaning duties in Japan.
Yes and no and but...
Yes - Broadly speaking most new cars are more powerful than they were in the late 70s and early 80s
No - Before the gas crisis we has a much larger lust for big powerful engines.
But - In the last 20 years especially there has been a mandated (i.e. NHSTA/etc) effort to make vehicles 'less harmful' to pedestrians in case of an impact. You can see some of this in the changes to front fascias/bumpers.
You hit on some of the complexity here. Cars are actually much quicker now. In the 1950s, a V8 police car made 85-150 horsepower. So, the bigger engines prior to the 70s were quite slow compared to cars today. As you note, the speed gains must be partially offset (fully?) by the advances in safety: tires, anti-lock brakes, pedestrian-friendly bumpers, and more.
[0] As someone who loves smaller hatchbacks, this really grinds my gears.
It's possible, though, that the larger vehicles represent a greater danger due to poorer visibility. I don't have enough experience driving a contemporary truck or SUV to know the driver's experience, but I do know that, when parked along the street, they present a serious visibility problem for pedestrians compared to coupes and sedans.
since the 1970s, the number of cars per person in the USA has increased by ~50%, the number of people has increased by ~60%, and, vehicle miles traveled per capita had (previous to 2020) nearly doubled.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-962-january-30-201...
Well, I'm not defending that position so much as I am parroting that crowd's idea that unsupervised childhoods were better.
I think in both cases there's an element of prescribing the loss of options in favor of some notion of greater good. Whether it is a warranted trade-off or not, I don't know, but the Benjamin Franklin quote comes to mind: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"
Despite the effort to develop critical thinking skills, a small but not insignificant number of students parrot what they watch on questionable news outlets.
the one exception was my teacher for a public policy elective. he considered any reasonable newspaper to be an acceptable source, and accepted a simple footnote with a link as a citation. the catch was that he would actually follow the links and dock points if we had misinterpreted the source or failed to address the source's bias. I recall that students actually wrote some good papers in that class...
Her teachers tend more toward the exception you described. They have conversations about the quality of sources. Teachers definitely follow some links to make sure students aren't bullshitting. She was definitely introduced to the mechanics of putting a bibliography together. But I think the emphasis is on looking at issues from different sides. I remember thinking that it sounded like my friend's recollection of law school where he had to make arguments from different points of view.
They are simply a middle man between foreign agencies and domestic users. Foreign countries really do exploit all those platforms for their own interests.
Newspapers have always had this power, the difference now is it's on the internet instead of print. Once TV's became common place the evening news also had this power. This has always been how things worked the difference now is the reach is larger and the turnaround time is faster.
No.
> Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries.
Yeah, that's really not true, even if you specifically limit it to media firms (e.g., Hearst at its height), and ignore, e.g., extractive/colonial firms like oil companies, United Fruit Company, and the various East India Companies, and also ignore much of history before the modern period, when there was no real public/private distinction, and the things we now think of as public functions were overtly private property rights exercised, quite often, for personal profit.
> Social media platforms should never have been allowed to become the arbiters of democracy.
They aren't the arbiters of democracy, only of their own platforms. Just like other media companies.
Here is a copy: https://files.catbox.moe/71gfr1.mp4
For those that don't want to play a video this is an unabridged transcript:
"I know your pain. I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us, it was a landslide election and everyone knows it especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anybody hurt. It's a very tough period of time, there has never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us, from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election but we can't play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home, we love you, you're very special, you've seen what happens you've seen the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace."
I was watching a live stream from the mob and the protesters (the buffalo costume guy, in fact) were trying to get other protesters to leave on the basis of trumps message and people were believing the claim was fake because twitter restricted sharing so the only way to see it was to directly go to the page.
Seems like an odd choice.
A bit orchestrated? To show the less radical Trump supporters, this is what your president is responsible for, chaos and anarchy in the capitol. Disturbing the democratic process.
But I guess, don't assume evil, what can be explained with incompetence.
He can certainly influece it, but did he? If not, who is responsible for the lack of defensive preparations, the local police? The FBI?
DC is not a state, it’s a district under federal control. There is a mayor and a police department, but responsibilities that would normally fall to a state-level government are handled federally.
This is a contentious issue in the US right now, because it means that the residents do not have representation in the house and senate.
Further, the insurrectionists were definitely armed, at least five guns were seized from among those arrested.
https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/13-arrested-5-weapons-reco...
From Merriam-Webster
Armed protestors invaded the Capitol intent on disrupting the government from certifying an election. This was quite literally an insurrection.
In the case of Washington, DC they are not. The mayor has a normal municipal police force and the president has control over the equivalent of the state-level force, which would usually be called for such an incident. The Capitol specifically also has another force, independent from the municipal police, which is federally controlled.
There are numerous reports Trump explicitly refused to allow the National Guard to respond; governors of two adjacent states mobilized their state forces instead, and eventually Pence also mobilized the DC guard, which it's not really clear he had the authority to do (or if he does, also the authority to issue orders contravening Trump's refusal).
This could've been prevented if the president (1) didn't incite this and (2) didn't deny national guard to step-in.
So what's left is the capitol police facing a mob invited by the president, without backup. And they stated they had two choices, barricade the capitol and prevent entry, or evacuate the people inside.
It could've gotten ugly if the people in the capitol got overrun, e.g. Pelosi facing people that think they're sent by Q to fight off a satanic coup by Pelosi, but they got evacuated to safety. Apparently capitol police chose to evacuate rather than to barricade, in hindsight that's clearly the least risky option to human health. If they break through with nobody inside, that's not as bad if they break through anyway with people inside. A bunch of idiots roaming the capitol building isn't a threat per se, shameful and sad yes, but not one that should've been met with violent force from a small number of capitol police at the expense of (and risk of not) evacuating the people inside.
Of course, if the mob were leftists or had any significant amount of minorities mixed in, there would have been rivers of blood outside the Capitol.
Can someone explain why the people trained in handling civilians, ie the police in the capital of the united states, is not enough in order to secure a building?
A large protest can have 100,000-500,000 protesters [1]
So even if 95% of protesters are peaceful, a mere 5% inclined towards disorder can easily outnumber the local police. So it's not so crazy they'd need to call backup from somewhere. Why it's so common to deploy the national guard rather than cops from other nearby jurisdictions I don't know.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_in_the_United... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Police_Department... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C.
Even the most self-sufficient of cities would find their cops outnumbered in such a situation.
"Nope, can't do that, not enough timeslices on mutex semaphore of a monadic type for me to transpile that functionality of changing the color of the background"
This seems really strange to me. So the capitol police isn't staffed and doesn’t plan for a situation where they need to do both of these things?
What struck me the most is that the rioters seem like just a few hundred/thousand. Definitely scary but should have been able to be controlled by law enforcement. It wasn’t a million people or a zombie horde.
Their web site [0] says they have 2,300 officers and staff. So even if only half are officers it seems like 1,150 armed, trained capitol police should be able to control a mob of this size.
Certainly rioters trying to stage a coup is a rare event but seems like something that the capitol police should have contingency plans for.
Them saying that they had to choose between evacuating lawmakers and protecting the building seems like they need a lot of help planning.
That’s what I mean about odd that they don’t have a plan for this. I live near a top 50 city and the local police has crowd control equipment. Seems like the National capitol police would have some capability for this.
Certainly not shooting everyone.
Then there would be the question, of why there was no riot gear, when riots or riot-like situation could be expected. And since this was a planned event - and protestors openly planned to storm it - then maybe there should have been some better preparation?
And crowd control is indeed tricky, but it is still standard procedure for police.
You have fences.
You have lines of strong policemen with shields and tonfa.
You have tear gas.
Watercannon.
Beanbag.
Taser.
And ultimately, if rioters are indeed shooting or preparing to do so: there are guns with the police, too.
Many others brought the point: there probably would have been rivers of blood, if the black life matters movement, would have tried to storm the capitol.
But was this not known?
The FBI could not bring more people in?
But yes, could also very well explained by, "they would not really dare it" preparation.
They were there in the first place because of his message
> 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!
It is possible to simultaneously believe that the election results are illegitimate and to live peacefully in society. It requires a bit more mental flexibility than I like to give myself, but there is precedent.
The call to action (go home with love & in peace) trumps the frame.
Take use of the word "socialism" or "nationalism." I've seen a disturbing tendency on the right to call anything they don't like "socialist." Nothing makes that clearer than Trump's call to the Cuban expatriates in Florida to vote against the "communist" Joe Biden.
If you know anything about Biden's policies you would recognize them as pretty standard Progressive policies. I have never once heard him discuss taking private property and distributing it as a public good. He's not once talked about erasing private enterprise. He is manifestly not communist. So the only conclusion I can draw is that Trump is using "communist" to mean "person you don't like" so he can fan the flames.
Given that, I don't think we can take anything he says at face value. This is actually a common tendency on the right, and it's why they're so good at fanning the flames. They see what our words mean and they disregard that meaning.
Or they know the truth, but respect and follow the forceful power, which Trump wants to represent.
Edit: I guess people misinterpret what I mean. The truth is that Biden has won honestly, but insurgents just don't respect that.
This even seems a lot tamer and more to the point than Trump usually is.
"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!"
I agree with the premise. If your vote is stripped from you then force may be justified as you have no other option. The problem is that votes were not stripped and he knows it.
If you were to read that and go to Trump's twitter feed and read the above quoted tweet, you would now be left with two competing ideas: Was Trump inciting the mayhem or trying to quell it?
On the other hand, if you go to his Twitter feed and just see what's currently there, two blank spots replaced with, "This Tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules," you will think, "oh, Trump was inciting mayhem."
So deleting those tweets helps construct a narrative.
Certainly hasn't been shrieking that the election was stolen and that if Democrats control the government it's the end of democracy. Literal apocalyptic rhetoric that millions lap up.
Then of course at the rally yesterday telling people to march on the capitol building where they are currently stealing the election!
Anyone could see this was the most likely outcome of Trump's behaviour. I can't see how anyone could honestly argue otherwise.
I feel like the “Twitter internal politics” explanation is more convincing than eg some small committee of expert moderators looking at trumps tweets and carefully deciding if they break the rules, balancing that with public interest considerations, and deciding if some restrictions should be placed on them
Even if he didn't think it, as what he thinks shouldn't matter unless he wants the stirrup to continue. He's supposed to be a politician, or even just a grown up person after all, not a child who cannot control himself.
Living in Hungary, living through this very same shit for 10, or maybe 14 years now, I've watched the whole Trump story in horror, but also thinking most of the time: yeah, this is kind of expected. This double talk thing is something our PM (Viktor Orban) does a lot of time. So yeah, Trump didn't want to calm these guys down, or to be more objective, that's not what he DID (even if we believe he's totally childish and dumb).
> "Even if he didn't think it, as what he thinks shouldn't matter..."
no, that's called lying, and we don't want presidents (or any person with even a modicum of power) doing that, even if we disagree (sometimes vehemently) with what he says. we have checks and balances on what the president can do, which is what matters. it would be great if trump were gracious, but he's not, and the people have (admittedly narrowly) spoken against him. our system has actually shown that it can tolerate a presidency like his intact.
There were two more tweets that led to the definitive suspension of the account, per the NYT. This is one tweet that was taken down almost immediately around 6:00PM.
“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,” he tweeted. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
I mean, 'Remember this day forever'? Like it's the Alamo? Really?
Considering the way Trump, during his infamous Georgia phone call, fell back to weasel words to allow him to claim plausible deniability, such stating that "in my opinion they are shredding votes" after fellow Republicans made it very clear that there was absolutely no doubt that no vote was shredded... Those statements sound like nothing more than further weasel words to allow him to weasel himself out of any responsibility for his own actions.
On the flip side, if everyone hates you equally you're probably on the right track.
This gives pedophiles the moral high ground.
I'd say @dang is pretty liked around here! Ups to the great umpire, keep it up. This shit is hard.
I think they would be pretty pissed off to know that they've been banned for months or more because they said something that rubbed the mods the wrong way at one point.
We know, but some of us enjoy reminding Ian Murdock's friends-in-need of what they did.
Preferably before it's their turn to ask for help...
Just flip the showdead switch in settings and you can enjoy the infinite wisdom and feistiness of banned users. Can’t be easier. For instance, in this thread there’s exactly one banned sibling, making a gross, sexual personal attack.
Edit: People downvoting me even though I'm right. Take most of the comments you see on Twitter in subject matter and/or delivery, and they would be either downvoted or moderated off this platform. No-one in good faith (who has had reasonable exposure to Twitter) could argue this is not the case. Just to be clear, I believe this to be a good thing.
Reddit, slashdot, and a whole slew of others went through an HN-like phase of high-quality discussions and content before turning into cesspools.
I think what makes HN unique is benevolent sponsorship. There isn't pressure to grow. It's recruiting for Y-Combinator, which eliminates most of the normal pressures.
* Archived here: http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2009_3_12_33338_3000.html
I have to say from everything I heard about the guy, and my own rare interactions with him, the hatred of him was 100% justified. Some people are just very shitty and lack any sympathizers.
Facebook, Twitter et al. built enormous platforms for speech and thus got caught up in the middle of all cultural and political conflicts on this planet. Not just American election(s), but elections in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Germany, UK, Brazil, plus religious conflicts such as Islamists vs. people who draw Muhammad.
They cannot possibly stay neutral in all those wars at once and when they start taking sides, they will be hated first and then, later, either dismembered or regulated to be a de-facto arm of the government.
This is the false equivalence argument. Some argue that 5g spreads covid. Some argue it doesn’t. You advocate both views and everyone hates you.
Doesn’t make you right.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/30/951095644/even-if-its-bonkers...
so in the end you have to anchor this to some expertise and grounded-in-reality judgement.
For example, the majority in the aforementioned poll believed that COVID-19 was created in a lab in China. And to be honest, an average person really has no way of truly knowing this. They're not virologists or spies. They can only judge based on a gut feeling whether China is/isn't evil, and that is likely based on other things they've heard, which may include rumors, propaganda and Bond movies.
And you could say that this is it, but given the strong polarization and extremism around topics that involve politics it might be a good measure in this case. (Of course, depending on what exactly 'everybody' means.) By definition extremists of either side will see independent actors as hostile. But, of course, this is just a measure, not a proof.
Afaik, one big issue is that this account was operating under different rules then everybody else. As in, twitter was more permissive with Trump then with other people.
That is not being content neutral. Had it been content neutral, his account would be policed the same way as other peoples years ago.
If he wants to tweet in the official capacity of the President of the United States of America, there is an official Twitter account for that.
Of course, the cynical reason is that Trump's tweets are responsible for a significant percentage of Twitter's "engagement" metrics; I'm sure that internally they have figures that indicate how much revenue they generate from Trump alone.
i do get the diffficult choice Twitter faced, Trump was / is the president. So everything he says is part of the official record. So I guess banning his personal account would ba quite difficult. Twitter, Facebook, YoutTube and so on could have added disclaimers already much earlier, so.
A month from now Trump will not be on Twitter. Nobody will actually see what he allegedly says but he'll be gone.
i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
You're right, no doubt. Though technically all the previous presidents do that. even Michelle Obama is on book tours and such. George W Bush does stuff with Michelle Obama as well.
>i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
True even before potus.
Here's the reality though. The political divide in the USA is at like 30+ year high. It used to be just democrats who divided. Republicans hadnt really changed much over the last several decades.
With platforms like twitter pushing republicans off their platform. It means the echo chamber will be becoming much worse. The political divide just begun for the republicans. The divide will become much larger than it is today because there's even less intermingling.
The joe rogan podcast #1258 with Jack Dorsey and Tim Pool is a pretty good watch. Twitter has extensively banned right-wing personalities off their platform while outright allowing left-wing people break the rules.
For example Twitter recently blocked virtually all negative news about Joe biden and hunter biden during the election. For example in place of blocking the NYpost's coverage of hunter biden's corruption. They banned people to hide the story and then put a counter news article that called it fake news as trending.
Flipside, Twitter allowed Smollet's hate crime hoax. Twitter allows celebrities calling for the death of that maga hat kid. They allowed the russian collusion stuff that turned out to be completely false.
twitter is very biased.
Banning him years ago would be censorship but with clear rules equally applied to all.
Now we are unequal censorship.
Twitter is trending down and will probably not recover but they were going to take a nosedive after Trump left. This gives them political points with the left.
How does outrage lead to more ad revenue? Who wants their brand advertised next to outrage? How many outraged people click on ads?
Trump and any president, on a whim can speak live to all Americans through all cable news channels. He could have called NBC, Fox, CBS, ABC etc to the Oval Office and in 5 minutes be live on basically every channel (including being streamed live on twitter). Instead he choose Twitter.
But yeah, he can always address the press and let the press disseminate his statements, which has its own pros and cons.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1346970432017031178
Edit: nobody has an answer? It seems a very important question. Like if you say “spreading fake news”, you are saying Twitter should act as an authority of truth. Since they can’t possibly be that, where does that leave us?
However, it's a private site & they don't need to justify their giving service or not.
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469127807005777...
It is a fact that that this election is over, and Biden won fair and square. 60 losses in State and Federal courts proves that. And yet Trump continues to incite his supporters by spreading falsehoods - the election was stolen, the other side committed fraud, patriots need to #stopthesteal and so on. Even yesterday he promised never to concede.
But sure, selectively look at the text where says “remain peaceful”. What a joke people like you are.
------
>Be There. Will Be Wild!
------
a supporter misspelled the word “cavalry” in tweeting that “The calvary is coming, Mr. President!”
Mr. Trump responded: “A great honor!”
------
But first came the remarks of the President, delivered on the Ellipse, just south of the White House.
“We will never give up,” he said. “We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s death involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”
The USA could be a dictatorship if Trump were just slightly smarter.
The only reason they’re acting now is that their excuse is about to expire. If they found another good excuse, Trump would stay.
What’s happening this week isn’t new, it’s been happening for years.
He will probably not leave politics entirely, though. That would mean being forced to admit that he lost which is beyond his ego.
That’s true in the sense that Twitter’s rules change specifically motivated by Trump’s violation of their pre-existing rules applied globally, not just in the US, and enabled and was seized on by similarly-oriented leaders elsewhere, as well.
Those laws are a mistake, because sooner or later, you elect a man who revels in being above the law, and who will act accordingly. Yesterday, such a man started a coup, in order to retain power. A few days before that, he was committing election fraud in Georgia. These are serious crimes, the consequences of which he is shielded from.
It's just a modern version of the divine right of kings.
These laws exist for a reason. And just because Trump is Trump doesn't mean it doesn't work well most of the time. Remember this is the same man chanting "lock her up" and promised to change libel laws so he could sue everyone and their mother. Do you think he wouldn't have gone after elected officials with lawsuits?
And for most countries these laws are very far from absolute, and/or come with escape hatches.
If you are a DA, yes. Private citizens can't file criminal charges. A judge would throw your case out, and you'd probably be disbarred, though. Those are the checks and balances inside our legal system.
If you can't see the difference between POTUS committing a clearly defined crime (Say, election fraud... Or sedition.) and the legal 'theories' of the sovereign citizen movement, I don't know what to say.
> Or charge MPs for libel or slander for saying their opinion about something?
1. You can already do that. Libel and slander are civil cases, and you can sue anyone you want in civil court, for any reason whatsoever, including POTUS.
2. If the courts find it to actually be libel or slander, why the hell not? If an elected official knowingly spreads lies and falsehoods that cause you material harm, you should be entitled to restitution.
> These laws exist for a reason.
Yes, elected officials passed them to protect themselves from legal consequences for their actions.
> And just because Trump is Trump doesn't mean it doesn't work well most of the time.
No, it doesn't work well most of the time. There's a very clear lack of equality under the law in this country - with the executive, its minions, and its friends being very clearly above the law.
> Remember this is the same man chanting "lock her up" and promised to change libel laws so he could sue everyone and their mother.
So, hold on, let's break this down.
We currently have laws that protect the executive from criminal prosecution.
This protection, at the moment, only applies to the current executive, not someone who might become part of the executive in the future.
And you are concerned that weakening these laws will let the current executive attack their future opposition.
... That doesn't make a lick of sense. Prior to getting elected, Trump had no power to 'lock her up'. After Trump got elected, Hillary was no longer protected, because she was not part of the executive.
How exactly is making the sitting president immune to criminal prosecution protect their political opponents from his vindictive behaviour? If anything, it empowers his vindictive behaviour. He is using these laws to protect himself, as he attack his opposition, and prevents a peaceful transfer of power.
And yes, I'm aware that impeachment exists. The impeachment process is a kangaroo court, the impartiality of which would make a Soviet judge blush.
I'm not really interested about a conversation about various details; especially not if your response is just a flat unnuanced "elected officials passed them to protect themselves from legal consequences". I'm not even talking about the US specifically. The world is larger than the US, and the US doesn't even have MPs. I don't even know the specifics of the US laws on this.
The official Twitter account of the POTUS is @POTUS, not @realdonaldtrump.
(1) https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/worldlead...
The smart move is to bide their time slowly backing him down without angering him until January 20th when he no longer has any power to use any lever of power.
A furious Trump issuing a blanket pardon to anyone on Parler after being kicked off twitter could be a real result.
EDIT: What I specifically doubt is that Trump can just write out a pardon for "anyone on Parler". Doesn't it have to be a pardon for someone specific? Or can it be as generic and vague as he wants?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNZc9H54eBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx4FD6xtLJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMiOMNIRs3k
TLDR: He can pardon any federal offense.
President Carter pardons draft dodgers
On January 21, 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter grants an unconditional pardon to hundreds of thousands of men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War.
In total, some 100,000 young Americans went abroad in the late 1960s and early 70s to avoid serving in the war. Ninety percent went to Canada, where after some initial controversy they were eventually welcomed as immigrants. Still others hid inside the United States. In addition to those who avoided the draft, a relatively small number–about 1,000–of deserters from the U.S. armed forces also headed to Canada. While the Canadian government technically reserved the right to prosecute deserters, in practice they left them alone, even instructing border guards not to ask too many questions.
<https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/president-carter...>
(Not an endorsement of a mass pardon of all Parler members.)
But the Carter case does address the circumstance of pardoning a large (and arguably unknowably large) class.
Carter pardoned anyone/everyone who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_4483
But I suppose that might be unfamiliar to American readers as they did not enter the war at the beginning, and "Peace for our time" was invoked in a different context by JFK.
If they had blocked his account years, or even months ago, they would have had maintained no credibility as a platform, in the pocket of the left, etc.
If they don't take a stand now, they're all but complicit in perpetuating this [riot? attempted coup? insurrection?]
That said, people should be careful what they wish for: we don't want a couple of powerful media platforms deciding which speech is considered permissible and which isn't. They have to be very conservative in their approach or these platforms will cease to carry any authority.
Nobody in US politics has benefited more from Twitter and Facebook than Trump himself. Anything that makes us stop relying on those as sources of fact or reasoned political discussion sounds like it has a high chance of being a good thing to me.
That authority is given by users basically. And users don't really care about media health.
That said, I agree this kind of selective platform favoritism is (currently very minimally, but still) discriminatory. For example some people might not want to use Twitter for ideological reasons. (Let's say because it's a fucking cesspool that just generates tension.)
When reading up about it, it seems like websites like twitter would have to either completely remove all types of moderation or get strict enough moderation that user comments would be unfeasible to allow.
I don't see how that would accomplish anything but remove the social media sector from USA.
Although I have yet to hear anyone's theory on what it could be replaced with.
No, I think the next Trump will do what Putin did with VKontakte and will take the company directly from the owners' hands (there are numerous ways to do that even in a Western democracy, the hostile takeover has practically been invented in the US). Of course he (most probably will be a "he") won't do that directly, one of his business friends will help. Things like "removing section 230" are just syntactic sugar that keep us programmers/geeks busy by barking at the wrong tree.
Pull the other one. That's not what it was.
We shouldn't act like Twitter is muzzling him during a time of crisis.
Surely, a sitting US president can talk to the public without begging a private company to publish his words.
Um, are television companies not private in the U.S.?
Do you regularly check the White House website?
Would it be appropriate to make ordinary statements on an emergency broadcast?
This is just completely ludicrous. Broadcasting where there are no listeners is useless.
The use of all/any of these things require the cooperation of, or direct services of, private companies.
Even public legal notices, going back the full history of the country, have been published on the pages of privately owned newspapers.
At best it's a mixed message. If you're telling people that the election is actively being stolen, what are your expectations for their response exactly? That they say "aw shucks" and go home?
“Stand down and stand by” is a prime example of this.
So the 4 years that Democrats said the election was stolen, and they illegally stormed the US Capitol at the Kavanaugh hearings, what should we have thought of that?
Basically every organization and politician on the left was supporting that and there was no Twitter censorship.
It's totally legitimate to say "I hate Trump and want to see him go", but it's impossible to stand on principle and say "Hey, Stacy Abrams is really in the right to say that her election was fraudulent forever" but Trump can't say the same.
It puts Twitter in the position of legitimizing certain claims of fraud and discounting others in national elections. That's frightening, and people supporting this should think what an alternate world would look like where billions of people were on Parler and not Twitter.
Yeah, that's kinda how truth and lies work.
not the left. Lots of D politicians, granted. But I can't believe you seriously think that the "the election was fraudulent theatrics" (which I'll take for granted as theatrics, though a more careful treatment is warranted) of D politicians and e.g. Rachel Maddow could ever have had the same effect as these theatrics from Trump and co, which call for armed citizens to take action.
And the citizens weren't armed. The people killed were the unarmed protestors, by the police.
We can imagine what would happen if they had a certain skin color and were protesting a different event. It isn't the reaction that would happen today.
I've seen people on social media in the past few weeks talking about bringing weapons to DC for what happened earlier today. Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested a couple days ago in DC while carrying high capacity magazines [0]. A lot of pictures I've seen of people in the capital building today show them carrying heavy duty zip ties. Why did they have these? Were they planning on taking prisoners/hostages?
We've also seen the reaction to other protests in DC in the last few years. The police response today was much smaller than other recent protests.
Donald Trump's response to statues being torn down was to push for long sentences for people damaging federal property [1]. Has he also pushed for long sentences for people trespassing in the capital buildings and damaging them?
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/4135703001
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thedenverchannel.com/news/a...
This kind of positioning is frustratingly confusing to me. What do you personally gain exactly by saying something so obviously false?
Truly am curious what is forming the foundation of such a position you have?
” Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.”
Sept 2019
It is still absurd to act like there is an equivalence between her claiming that Russian interference misled voters into choosing the "wrong" candidate, vs. Trump (a) claiming that ballots were manufactured, altered or tampered with and that actual voting infrastructure and processes are corrupt, (b) having his legal team launch a bunch of frivolous lawsuits in various states, and (c) pressuring the secretary of state of an electorally-close state to overturn election results.
Clinton's statements, as overblown as they may have been, were just an accusation of unfairness, not calling for the results to be overturned and the loser installed in office. All of the #resistance rhetoric was about the need to defeat Trump through the electoral process, or through parliamentary procedures (based on his actions after taking office). Again, there is a fundamental difference between claiming that voters were lied to, and claiming that the government itself directly interfered in the voting process without ANY remotely credible evidence to back that claim.
Trying to equate the two situations because they both involved the use of the word "illegitimate" is beyond laughable.
That’s not the point.
Clinton claims election is stolen. Uncritical article written.
Trump claims election is stolen? Obvious coup attempt and a need to curtail freedoms.
She conceded hours after polls closed. 2019 likely was not the first time she criticized Trump's legitimacy, but the intention was always different.
You mean ... showed up and were lawfully admitted to hearings, and then were disruptive by yelling? Or do you have something else in mind?
"Democrats stole the election"
"They are the enemy of the people"
etc. etc.
These are all things Trump actually says, ad verbatim, and has been repeating this for the better part of a year. If these things were true then violence would be a logical, reasonable, justified, and appropriate response to stop a hostile anti-democratic takeover of the country.
Of course, nothing of Trump's claims are true. Not even remotely. Not even a tiny kernel of truth in it.
But you just can't expect people who actually hold this worldview to quietly stay at home. I wouldn't, if this would actually be happening.
As I've said many times before, if the current path continues it's only a matter of time before there is actual real bloodshed, and Trump and his bootlickers can't just wash their hands with "but I said I they had to remain calm!"
And if you look at the cause for all of this ... it's not even a political disagreement really, it's just Trump not being mature enough to accept that a universe exists where he could lose an election. Good heavens all this ruckus for something so petty. Future historians will look back to Trump not too dissimilar to how we look back to Caligula.
Putsch
"A secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to overthrow a government"
Though this wasn't so secretly plotted.
But he's telling protesters to be peaceful, go home, and calling for respect for the law and law enforcement.
https://www.thetrumparchive.com/:
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!
I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!
Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!
As others have said, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?
That's not a call for order.
Given the large numbers of people involved you can probably find a Tweet that somebody twote that was a policy violation and didn't result in a lock.
What about that?
As for whether the post should be removed.. well, I’m personally against censorship, but if you’re going to remove Trump’s posts then I similarly think this post ought to be removed as well.
This seems evidently false. Some examples of such organizations are By Any Means Necessary and Refuse Fascism. Both are formed by various anarchists, Trotskyists and other radical (in the sense of wanting to radically change the current organization of society) leftists. Both fight against Trump administration and for LBTGQA+ rights and various forms of socialism.
The message they removed for violating their rules stated-- after repeating the stolen election blather that he's been spinning for the last month--:
"We have to have peace. We have to have law and order we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anybody hurt. [...] We have to have peace. So go home, we love you, you're very special, you've seen what happens you've seen the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.
Here is a copy of the full video: https://files.catbox.moe/71gfr1.mp4
Knowing this, do you believe that it was still the right move to suspend his account over this particular video rather any of hundreds of prior cases or-- no doubt-- the hundreds of opportunities which would arise in the coming months?
Trump lost so the best way to maximize attention/profit is to shake things up on Trump’s way out. Ie start applying the rules to him with enough time for him to react to it before the end of his presidency. This seems like a highly calculated move with only one motive, and it isn’t the good of the people.
"Censorship" by a private party is a modern extension of the meaning of the term and it is not universally accepted.
And there has been no further news, so the news media moved on to other news, like the siege of the U.S. Capitol building.
No it doesn't. In the U.S., the law is explicitly clear that censorship by the government is subject to strict limitations, but censorship by private parties is part of those parties' exercise of their own rights to free speech. Compelling one person to spread the speech of another person is a form of censorship that censors the former's opposition to the latter's speech.
There are only a handful of cases that compel private parties to tolerate speech they disagree with on their own property (basically, malls), and the scope has been narrowed over time. (See Pruneyard and subsequent cases.)
Things like "private parties", property rights, I'd say that even the idea of "government", come after that fear has been dealt with.
Private property, private rights, and government, have all existed before the "fear" (whatever it is you mean by that) was dealt with.
I'm talking about the basis of the US Constitution, its "spirit", so to speak. My reading of the Federalist Papers is that one of the main reasons-to-be of the Constitution was to avoid tyranny, the men that wrote that thing down put things like respecting private property or even what form of government to use after that. I admit, maybe I'm wrong on that interpretation (I've read them about three years ago), but I've recently started reading a selection of Anti-federalist Papers and I stand by my opinion.
> FB's and Twitter's constitutional rights
Again, there was nothing in the Federalist Papers (nor in the Constitution) about respecting the rights of private, abstract, soulless entities. Yes, I know about the relatively recent decision that gave those corporations a "political soul" (so to speak), but that decision had nothing to do with the original spirit of the basic law on which the USA was founded.
I mean, if conversations on twitter are akin to conversations in a public park in the USA, then you would expect the same social / legal conventions to hold on twitter as in public spaces. If I incited violence in the local park, there are norms and laws that come into play. Arguably the same laws should hold on twitter. From that perspective, its weird that a tech company acts as the judge and jury - rather than the police and the courts. And complaints about censorship make total sense.
But if you think of twitter, google, facebook etc as corporate serfdoms, then there's no problem with twitter's enforcement. Twitter is a space owned and ruled by a tech company. You rent your twitter account, but own nothing. Twitter can set any rules they like, or set no rules and act entirely capriciously. The interesting question is whether or not we want the internet to work like a weird echo of the middle ages. And what (if anything) we should do about it.
EDIT another good take, reversion to feudalism:
„Twitter & Facebook act as
a) De facto spaces of prominent public debate b) De facto news content (press)
De jure, they pretend they're in private tech business (to escape legal responsibility of a +b)“
https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1347155317516365826?s=21
I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the capitalist structure in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives." [1]
-- Wendy Liu
[1] https://medium.com/@dellsystem/dont-put-your-faith-in-uber-7...
Public squares do not have corporate policies. Twitter has never been a public square they've always enforced speech rules from the beginnings.
230 grants platforms both freedom from liability and gives them the ability to moderate. They do not need to pick.
Nope. User-generated content can be moderated and Section 230 protections still apply:
> With that done, we can discuss the various ways you might have been wrong about Section 230. If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher" […]
* https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
I don't know the exact wording of section 230. Even if I knew it, it wouldn't help, because I'm not a lawyer.
That's why I don't understand where the line is drawn and why. If the idea is to "protect open platforms from liability from user content", why is it okay to have policies that remove child porn, but not those that remove incitement to hate crimes?
IANAL: prior approval prior to posting.
If an employee of the publisher is in the 'chain of command' and hits a "Publish" or "Approved" button in the CMS, then it is editorial authority.
If any random yahoo can post something without moderation beforehand, then it is user generated. But the CMS operator could then remove the content after the fact per ToS.
There still are significant distinctions. NYT and CNN have a much smaller number of people publishing news, who are hired and paid for their work. Twitter is just a host with a block button. For example Twitter doesn't have a sign-up hiring interview so anyone could have an account. Another distinction is that Twitter is publish first, ban later while newspapers are filtering before publishing.
Demanding a rule that works for few people to scale to hundreds of millions is wishful thinking. It's a different situation requiring different treatment.
Why do you conflate any discussion of censorship and freedom of speech with the First Amendment of the US’s constitution?
It's constant to read opinions like that in threads like this. We used to have this argument in the 60s where private businesses argued they didn't have to serve blacks since they were a private business. Political speech/activity is protected when it comes to labor law. It's not hard to see the law updated at some figure point. Discrimination is discrimination in my book, and free speech is paramount even the most repugnant opinions.
Is there? Who's making it? Can you give examples?
I mean unless you are logging this and charting it I'm going to assume people are seeing whatever is confirming their priors on this one.
Exactly.
Forcing twitter to quote trump would be coerced speach rather than free speech.
Otherwise, I'm censoring trump right now my not putting his tweet content in this comment, and so are you because you didn't put it in yours
Are you under the impression that the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations is a private entity?
Some people here despise Facebook for privacy concerns, but it's still a useful private network for family and friends not constrained by the message/length format.
Twitter generates so much negativity, so much strife between people who constantly yell at each other over nothing that socially it is the most toxic place on the internet.
As for public officials using Twitter, a private company for their main communication channel instead of using government websites, they need to stop doing that.
That's a relevant point and I hope every public official would do this. However, what people seem to miss is that Twitter, just like other social media such as Facebook or Instagram, started to, in people's mind, transform into a public agora and lose their private status. The thing is they gained so much power and became so essential and valuable as far as society and political life are concerned that they're now considered as communication channels where everyone, including public officials, should have the right to express their opinion as long as it doesn't break the TOS, which is something I can, in fact, hardly disapprove.
Beef. It's what's for twitter.
If this was the country our textbooks say it is, this would be celebrated as an example of how egalitarian the country is.
There are a lot of countries where this wouldn't be possible, and Americans should be glad we aren't at that point (yet, at least).
The President put out a video asking people, in plain language, to go home and co-operate with Capitol police. In this same video he reaffirmed his contention that the election was fraudulent, and said that the protesters were loved. Whether he did this sincerely or as a ploy to increase the likelihood of being obeyed, nobody can say without mind reading powers.
One camp will say this video can be interpreted as harmful because it contains the claim that the election was fraudulent
Another camp will say you are allowed to hold the position that the election was fraudulent and at the same time condemn violence.
Twitter has chosen to interpret the video to say that there is a risk of violence despite a plain spoken appeal against violence. They are essentially interpreting the meaning of the message in a way that is contrary to the plain language used in the video.
In such a scenario I would probably not treat it as a rule, since this kind of rule can be made up spontaneously and can be used to stop anyone from saying anything really.
I think it should not be celebrated when a corporation decides to enforce arbitrary rules based on its own interpretations of someone else's plain words.
I'm all for it, but I recognise what is also happening as a result.
While in the above case it's the corporation pulling its own ad, and in the Facebook case they're a platform, the end result is the same. Some activist group tells the advertiser not to advertise because their ad equates them to X and X is bad, here are a bajillion deeply offended people.
At Facebook you have employees colluding with activist groups giving them tips on how best they can "effect change" on Facebook policy. Which advertisers to target, which controversies to use in their activism. It's all to bring about the desired political outcome of some radicals - limit the reach of my political enemy or their strongest arguments.
In the USA the religious group doing the activism is not Christianity anymore - back in the 70s and 80s the Christian lobby had the same degree of influence over TV show content. Today there is a secular belief system occupying that same position, with the opposing political party at the helm, much like the religious right of a few decades ago.
This nation was not formed to protect your speech from the ire public opinion, it was formed to protect it from states, the power that holder monopoly over forceful power.
Were they able to send their message to 10s millions of people instantly and lead them to things? or how long would it take them to reach all those people.
I wonder if today's leaders have a very different power compared to when most of these laws and systems were put in place?
"Our three main forces—the fleet, the workers, and the army units—must be so combined as to occupy without fail and to hold at any cost: (a) the telephone exchange; (b) the telegraph office; (c) the railway stations; (d) and above all, the bridges."
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/08.htm
Charles pissed them off a couple days earlier by trying to hoist onerous censorship so they showed him a middle finger.
Don’t fuck with people who buy ink by the barrel.
In essence there should simply be more printers, so that the King could get someone else to print his pamphlets.
No, definitely not. Some states would have had mechanisms for distributing stuff that the leaders wanted publicised, but it wouldn't generally have been all that common. And, in practice, in many cases, if the leader happened to be insane, the system would suppress it. George III wasn't bothering everyone in Britain with weird rants every few hours, say.
The ability of leaders to harangue the general public whenever they feel like it is, in practice, _very_ new; basically since Twitter became popular.
So just based off of their rules, he should have been banned for good a long time ago.
We get divisive arguments with no solution
Is that what we're seeing here? -- The fallout of society, media and leaders included, not valuing truth above personal gain
Historically America have incited and armed mobs to overthrow democratically elected governments in South America.
Why is it unacceptable this time around?
At least we know where Twitter stands now, unless you are literally involved in an actual insurrection against your own government, you won't get banned as a US president.
Twitter is a toxic force in society on balance. I'm glad I quit.
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!
https://projects.propublica.org/politwoops/user/realDonaldTr...
"We scored a goal, the umpire didn't see it and they stole our championship away from us. This is a disgrace. Go home in peace"
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship. When you take away the ability of people to participate in peaceful political discourse, you push them towards violence. Half of the American electorate currently feels profoundly unheard. They've lost their public voice and their ability to vouch for themselves, which has enabled mass media to flood every publication channel with parodies of them. The longer this continues, the greater the risk of violence will become. You can't make people's beliefs go away by silencing them.
What else these people demand? Not being called out for their behaviour?
What kind of platform they are looking for? What exactly could be changed to de-victimise those people?
Are the other people obligated to accept lies and bigotry?
What’s the plan here? Maybe the people who are into alternative facts should not annoy people who are into facts?
Guess what they do there? "Hey have you heard about white genocide??" etc.
There are even people that specifically go to reddit to encourage people to leave and go to the alt right website. It is a form of recruiting for the cause so to speak.
Reddit occasionally bans subreddits for various reasons (see r/fatpeplehate and the predecessor to r/hydrohomies). True, r/thedonald was banned, but not because of political leaning (r/conservative is running just fine), but because of how it was spreading misinformation and calling for violence.
That's the rhetoric Reddit used but I was completely unconvinced. They spent the better part of a year looking for a reason to ban /r/td, going as far as to invent "quarantining" as a soft-ban, and when they finally did so the cited evidence was extremely unconvincing.
But for any given sub that isn't political, there probably are not right and left-leaning subs. And given that viewpoint-based moderation is overwhelmingly-common on Reddit, this means that on non-politics based subreddits then engaging on any political issue as a right-leaning individual carries a decent risk of getting some sort of wrongthink ban. It's extremely common, sadly, and even though one can avoid politics entirely it's hard to just watch people circlejerk and mock people who hold your views when these issues do arise.
I'm not. For example, I was banned like a week ago from a sub for arguing that it's not obviously selfish/evil for someone to travel during COVID if one is allowed to do so. It was on a travel-related subreddit where there were no rules to this effect, but a mod felt that this sort of attitude was tantamount to advocating manslaughter.
Most subs will not have "no conservatives allowed" rules but the enforcement patterns often will not follow the rules.
Any community is free to set its own rules for who they consider welcome and you are more than able to join or create an alternative community where you feel more welcome.
That said, claiming that only right-leaning folks are being mocked or told to leave communities is highly disingenuous. Think about being a liberal/left-leaning gun owner and trying to participate in the vast majority of gun forums online. Or hunting forums. Or a lot of survivalist/bushcraft forums. Or militaria forums. Or car forums.
Didn't claim it was.
>That said, claiming that only right-leaning folks are being mocked or told to leave communities is highly disingenuous. Think about being a liberal/left-leaning gun owner and trying to participate in the vast majority of gun forums online.
I didn't claim this either, and quite frankly your eagerness to put words in my mouth is telling. In any case I'd be surprised if most gun forums that aren't on Reddit will just straight-up ban you for being liberal. But Reddit's viewpoint-based moderation goes much deeper than in subreddits that have ancillary ties to politics; for example it's very common for regional-based subreddits to have viewpoint-based discrimination that excises conservatives. If this is egregious enough it can cause schisms where you get left-wing/right-wing versions of the same sub, but usually that doesn't happen.
As an example of you probably leaving out a lot of context, you used the phrasing "wrongthink ban", which almost always goes hand-in-hand with (false) claims of being censored.
You also wrote that engaging in political discussion from a right-leaning viewpoint in non-political subreddits "carries a decent risk of getting some sort of wrongthink ban".
Dragging politics into spaces where they're not welcome is a bad idea, and will quite rightly upset the people in those spaces. It's their space and they get to choose what is welcome in it. Someone trying to forcibly insert themselves or their viewpoints into other people's space, when they are not welcome, is bound to create friction and anger.
Reddit doesn't promise that anyone has any right to participate in whichever subreddit they want to. That is up to the users and moderators of any given subreddit, no matter how arbitrary their rules may seem. You are free to find other subreddits to participate in. If your politics or general attitude is generally so that you find yourself unwelcome in most subreddits, that should be an indicator to perhaps be a little more diplomatic yourself, honestly. Or just disengage from Reddit entirely, you'll be fine without it.
Being of the belief that you should be welcome in all spaces and greeted on friendly terms by everyone is a really privileged position to hold. Not everyone is welcome everywhere.
Sometimes it will and oftentimes it won't. Again, this is my actual experience, and the experience of many others. If it comforts you to believe that I probably deserved it somehow, that I have to affirm my lived experience over your baseline skepticism, then it's not worth my time to try to shake you from that sort of complacency.
For example, as I relayed elsewhere on this thread, I was recently banned on a travel forum when a discussion of traveling during COVID arose and I took the position that it wasn't obviously selfish/ignorant to travel if officials in all the relevant jurisdictions approved of it. For this I was simply permanently banned, and my modmail inquiries were ignored. Now if you want to assume that I must've laced my posts with racial slurs or whatever I'll tell you that that's wrong but I'm not going to be able to prove it to you. But this is just how things work on many parts of Reddit.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Not everyone is equally welcome everywhere. Different owners/moderators set different limits, often based on precious situations, which you may not be aware of.
Specifically the argument of doing things that a lot of people consider irresponsible, even if they are not disallowed, is a very sore subject with a lot of people during this pandemic. Authorities in a lot of countries have been way too lax in imposing lockdowns and restrictions, leading to much higher numbers of infected and dead than would otherwise have occurred in the same amount of time.
Odds are that the travel subreddit you mention has seen a lot of people arguing that if there is no travel ban, they should be free to travel wherever they want and however they want, which really rubs a lot of people the wrong way, especially those who have lost loved ones and consider such behavior highly irresponsible. Odds are also that the moderators previously made an announcement or even rule changes prohibiting those sorts of discussions, because of how they rile people up.
In the eyes of the moderator, you transgressed the rules of the subreddit, so they firmly showed you the door. I make no judgment on whether whatever you posted was morally reprehensible, what matters is that the proprietor of that particular space found it so.
Reddit is a collection of many little kingdoms. Some of them have kings that just don't like you, for whatever reason. That's their prerogative and there's nothing you can do about it, except maybe creating a rival subreddit that potentially becomes more popular.
Yes, and we know what they say about wearing short skirts and sexual assault as well. I know how to read a room, but the point is that the mere fact of the double-standard is offputting.
>Reddit is a collection of many little kingdoms. Some of them have kings that just don't like you, for whatever reason. That's their prerogative and there's nothing you can do about it, except maybe creating a rival subreddit that potentially becomes more popular.
Ultimately I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out how this viewpoint-based moderation creates a bad experience for a lot of people that will lead to their turning to alternatives, and that the scale to which this is happening probably is not just Reddit "working as intended." And it's not like you can just casually jump from say a hobby subreddit that bans all Trump supporters on sight to a right-wing version of the subreddit that offers a remotely-similar experience. My point is a lot weaker than you're acting like it is, which is telling. "Moderators don't act like this, but if they do it's your fault, and if it's not your fault then you need to accept that this is how Reddit works." Do I though?
Interestingly, Reddit has stepped in when moderators have tried to get too forceful with eliminationism - for example, there have been attempts to create shared user blacklists across subreddits but these have largely been quashed by admins.
You bring it up because you were affected by it, I'm not sure you would react in the same way if the tables were turned. There are double standards everywhere, affecting everyone in some way and to different extents. Some face a lot more double standards than others. Consider that your experience is not unique to you nor to those who agree with you politically. Far from it.
> "And it's not like you can just casually jump from say a hobby subreddit that bans all Trump supporters on sight to a right-wing version of the subreddit that offers a remotely-similar experience."
In that case, if you wish to genuinely participate in that particular subreddit, you keep your politics to yourself and stick to the relevant subject matter. You quickly learn to segregate subjects, some forums are fit for one type of discussion, some for other types. Some have a very strict enforcement of tone, some are basically free-for-all.
Even if someone posts a political opinion that you disagree with, you are not obligated to react, in fact reacting may show your hand and sour everyone else to you, for something that is unrelated to the subject matter of the forum.
Discretion is the better part of valor, after all.
What you're experiencing is simply that you are not automatically welcome in all spaces you try to enter. Some people have experienced that for decades and centuries.
They would brigade and attack other forums?
They were a collection site for bad actors and even more dangerous content to the point that a large site like Reddit could get shut down.
There is some wishful thinking going on that all speech is equal, and that such speech was being conducted here.
I think those types of subs are/were annoying and filter most of them from my homepage. That said I never found /r/td to be anywhere near egregious as is said here, even the justification for the final banning was incredibly watery.
I mean Reddit changed their algorithms to ensure this never happened again.
T_D was 4chan tier stuff built around “owning the libs” and rubbing it in everyone’s face. The grace of a boozed uncle who wants to dance on your grave.
The other fun part is how long T_D was allowed to run Amok. Special gloves to avoid looking bad, something that’s also forgotten.
If you want to know how bad it is, simply see what their voat/ parler versions look like.
And I’m also not the kind of person who actually did the history digging and detective work on user accounts. This is all passive observation of internet drama.
The T_d crowd was happy with dog whistles and coded racism. For them to find r/politics or any other sub offensive is but natural.
Freedom of speech isn't the right to speak wherever you like. I don't have to let you speak on my lawn, on my stage. You just shouldn't disappear for disagreeing with the government.
To refit your analogy: what if your stage is the only stage there is?
I had a look at Parler earlier.
People like you are loud and vocal there too, you can start with the parody account Breitfart for example, the difference is that others are allowed to be loud and vocal there too.
So in a way equally bad as Twitter, just a bit more "nuanced" and even more noisy.
Breitbart, a huge network of News Corp, 4Chan, many subreddits, many youtube channels, many podcasts, radio channels etc are all dominated by those people.
Does everyone have to agree with them so they don’t feel deplatformed?
Everytime someone is removed from a platform they've been deplatformed[2]. The existence of a few remaining platforms that aren't participating in that effort doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
And don't be fooled; it is an active, organized effort whose ultimate goal is to make disagreement impossible. Hell, the term for it in the UK is "no-platform", which makes the goal quite clear. You seem to be arguing that movement doesn't exist, simply because it hasn't completely succeeded.
Nah, social media was the hub of misinformation and was abused and here we are. What they eventually did was too little and too late. There was a lot of fake news on FB, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit etc. that radicalized all these folks. Platforms like YouTube amplified it because it resulted in more views.
>When you take away the ability of people to participate in peaceful political discourse, you push them towards violence
Nah, the violence is mostly because they believe the election was stolen, based on fake news spread originating from 4chan and then spread on social media and high level politicians.
> You can't make people's beliefs go away by silencing them
But you can restrict the spread. No one objects when phishing scams and fraud targeting the elderly and others are blocked by social media and email platforms, why is there an objection when bullshit qanon and 5g conspiracies are blocked?
There was hardly any blocking on social media till about 2017, and things got way worse with these folks as the right wing and alt right abused the platforms. And now folks like you claim things will somehow get better if fake news is allowed to be spread unrestricted? I don't buy it one bit.
The way you counter misinformation is by debunking it and showing it is fake.
We live in a time where one side is spending all their time and energy to create as much fake content as fast as possible. Even if we had infinite time and energy to expose and debunk it all, the attention of the viewer is limited.
As result, we'll never be able to convince people who've read this fake content that what they read is false.
There's only two ways this can end:
1. We block this kind of fake, unverified content
2. We accept living in postfactual times where truth is up to the highest bidder and fake content decides elections.
Mine's not a clear vision, but I imagine this will become a critical issue for a generation and more.
Some future hipsters may come to see Donald Troll as a useful harbinger.
The genie isnt going back in the bottle. Your 1. is not happening. Just consider who we would need to be, in a future world of effectivly infinite information channels.
Your 2. Is unappealing but appears to be a false dichotomy.
We don't know how best to proceed: interesting times. Let's remain open to various possibilities, especially if driven by ICT.
There is also boat loads of research showing that just seeing false headlines results in people using that information to make decisions - even if they KNOW the headline was retracted.
You can debunk whatever you like, but at that pace of information flow today, this is essentially pissing into the wind.
By the time you have debunked one thing, many other topics have been generated and the conversation has moved on.
Its far easier to create content, and far harder to verify content. Our brains have some easily hackable ways to verify content.
I do object to both. Breaking end to end communications on the internet is censorship.
If you are set up to censor phishing, you are set up to censor dissent when the state puts a machine gun in the face of your sysadmin.
They truly believe there's a deep state that rigged the election. Throwing around using the 25th Amendment, calling them all terrorists committing treason/sedition, is only going to reinforce that the deep state is not only real but using every tool they have to attack them. The constant attempts to silence them by deplatforming and a whole host of other shadowy methods is confirming that the media, big tech, higher education, is full of people that not only despise them but with they would go away forever.
If we keep going down this path I guarantee violence is coming. 50 years from now we'll end up seeing the Oklahoma bombing as the opening salvo to what came next. McVeigh went full terrorist after Waco/Ruby Ridge. Don't give these people the confirmation they're looking for.
This is a fallacy. People can convince themselves of pretty much anything with the help of tribalism and leaders willing to lie. That doesn't mean you should sympathize with their desire for violence.
Weird so many people did some kind of dipsy-doo flip-aroo with elections in 2016/2020.
In the words of Obama in one of his last discourses as president (or perhaps his firsts as ex-president?), "reality has a way of catching up with you". The more your beliefs deviate from reality, the more you're going to be hitting your head against a wall.
What should an appropiate reaction be to people that believe that a deep state rigged the election storming a government building, and a president fueling that?
Transparency.
FoxNews screams conservatives have no voice, while patting themselves on the back for being the most watched cable channel. [1] Rush Limbaugh is the most listened to Radio show in the United States. [2]
Conservatives scream they have no platform on Facebook, yet the top 10 shared links of Facebook are almost exclusively conservative. [3], and you can observe this trend holding over time.
Conservatives have plenty of other platforms to go to. No one is deplatforming conservatives on 4chan, or Parler, or hell, even Reddit.
The 'deplatformed' narrative is a manufactured, and used to drive a persecution complex. Its not real, and used to rile the base.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-finishes-2020-as-most...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh#cite_note-late-3
[3] https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/134648457323691212...
I'm not from the US, and from an outsiders perspective, it is clear as day that reddit is liberal and votes democrat, and they think you are an idiot if you do otherwise.
I can go comment liberal ideas on Breitbart and immediately be shouted down as a commie CCP bootlicker and be blocked. I guess by your logic that means liberals are getting deplatformed too!
You chose the worst example. /r/conservative has been getting brigaded since before this election. One of the reasons for which /r/thedonald was quarantined in 2019. I know because everytime a big news from US get published in my country national papers, i used to open several subreddits in order to hear both sides of the story.
> I can go comment liberal ideas on Breitbart and immediately be shouted down as a commie CCP bootlicker and be blocked.
The same happens on the other virtual side of aisle. And it's not something unique to the US. I'm not American, but in my country the political discourse has been polarized the same way, with one side accused of been Putin's puppet, and those voting for them being accused of being fascists, and the other side now getting accused of being on China's payroll and getting called comunists.
The side controlling the biggest subreddit in my country, is the same that believes in the "russian puppets" story.
If you post from your personal account about some scandal that is on the national newspapers regarding the side they believe in, people start scraping your profile searching for information in order to dox you, and start sending you private messages insulting you.
If you post by using a throwaway because you don't want to risk receiving death threats just for having a different opinion, they start with the usual "this account is new, it's a russian propaganda troll".
The moderators delete threads and comments about arguments that damage their side, and if you politely ask for an explanation for the removal they insult you, ban you and mute you.
They got to the point that when some polital topics became damaging to their side because of huge mistakes that were made, they banned those topics with the excuse that "they bring brigaders and propaganda accounts".
This is not something that's only happening in right leaning echochambers.
And I don't think that this is something that helps keep an healty political discussion.
And yet still, even if none of that were the case, it's deeply immoral to paint violence as a somehow justifiable reaction to being shouted off Twitter for being a "racial realist", and other hills Trump supporters insist on dying on.
Seems rather like the opposite: a mob got riled up by misinfo and conspiracy theories that they never would've read or seen if [your outgroup here] were any good at censorship and deplatforming.
Let's talk about some other status quo questions you should accept:
1. Encryption is bad because the police need to catch bad guys.
2. It's fine and good for Google et all to sell your personal information.
3. Drones are good. We've been in Iraq for 20 years and that's fine and normal.
The news network they praise as gospel is quite literally the most watched thing on cable TV within the United States.
What are you basing your assumptions on? They seem to be very much incorrect.
Well they're wrong to think that and they should be discouraged from nursing that false belief. Conservatives have controlled the entire government for the last four years, including a conservative supermajority in the SCOTUS that will last for decades. In reality, those Americans are the most heard if by "heard" we mean having their political will effected by means of their government and not "permitted to shitpost on twitter".
If after all this the electorate feels profoundly unheard maybe they should look at who they vote for.
It's absurd to me to hear that people just needed to talk it out more openly! If only someone could nicely tell them the truth! As if all these people were discussing things in good faith and would listen to reality about their conspiracy theories. Must we really coddle and give a voice to dangerous conspiracy theorists that have steadily gotten more and more extreme and violent? They are being groomed and egged on by Republican leadership - surely that's the source of the problem, and one that nobody seems to be able to do anything about.
Blue-collar America (manufacturing, middle class) used to be a pretty stalwart blue supporting constituency. Now this group is welcoming populism and is pretty red. We've seen not just jobs but entire INDUSTRIES shipped abroad to the lowest bidder (it's cheaper to make something with slave labor, of course).
You might not care to "listen" but I think they have something interesting to talk about.
But if a party dilutes their message by embracing conspiracy theories, outlandish lies, bigotry, and authoritarian rhetoric, then what the hell? How is political discussion supposed to be in good faith anymore? If people want to talk to me about trade, they can talk to me about trade on whatever platform they want. I listen to them all the time. If they want to talk to me about how voting machines are rigged by Hugo Chavez, then they're probably not going to say, "oh, your right" when I show them facts that say otherwise.
Move down the hierarchy of needs a bit and listen to what people are discussing. It's not trade policy.
Props to the food banks and other organizations that did so much with so little.
Even if you don’t agree with that statement, are you honestly okay with our voting technology being outsourced and owned by a Venezuelan company?
I think there’s some sort of “orange man bad” blindness that is getting people to accept things they otherwise would never tolerate.
We're supposed to believe this was a coherent protest for populism and not just sour grapes flamed by the president?
The national flag of Great Britain?
The job of media is to report falsities not to take "actions" against them and assuming they know what's in people's minds
When people do not have confidence in the most basic aspect of democracy, you start to see what you did in DC. Regardless of party or country. Absolutely nothing has been done to assuage these concerns, and most responses have been dismissive. It is most likely going to reoccur whenever something like this happens.
When you examine the specific actions here, the President's remarks immediately prior to the incident exonerate him because he said in plain language to "peacefully and patriotically protest at the Capitol". There is no way to credibly accuse him of inciting a mob to be violent, but one could certainly accuse him of inciting a protest. This would not be unusual since there have been many peaceful protests at the Capitol during supreme court hearings and gun control related protests.
Even if you don't trust the journalists and editors at the NYT, the article links to primary sources from the US Supreme Court, Wisconsin Supreme Court, Pennsylvania Department of State and more so you can do your own research.
As a non-Trump-supporter who doesn't trust the mainstream media, where do you get your objective facts about politics? Do you just watch CSPAN or something? It seems like you'd miss out on a lot of important news that way.
I have not investigated this story thoroughly, but I have tried to get to the bottom of many other stories. Usually at the bottom I find uncertainty. I find lack of evidence. Confusion, bending, warping of reality to fit an agenda. There so much noise it's almost deafening.
"Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see". We are like children in the school playground spinning tales for each other. Imprinting our own thoughts and values and goals into the stories we tell. Barely aware of our own motives.
That is what happened here. The GOP poll monitors kept on breaking the rules and acting like asses. And they were eventually kicked out, totally legally and according to the rules they signed up for. And the Democratic poll watchers clapped, which may be 'unseemly' but isn't proof of "elections irregularities".
The president, with the 1/4 billion he raised, the full support of the GOP and their allies and supporters _at every level of every government_ and with the backing of the federal government were unable to raise a lawsuit that could convince even judges appointed by Trump. If there was evidence of fraud that could sway the election they would have found it, period. They didn't, ergo it doesn't exist.
The reason people didn't have confidence in the most basic aspect of democracy is because they have been lied to endlessly. Without ANY knowledge of how the system works, they took these lies at their face value. Many things were done to assuage those concerns, and they dismissed the evidence out of hand.
For example, Georgia.... does paper ballots counted by optical tabulators. They did a by-hand recount. The hand-counted totals matched the machine tabulation. This totally rules out any computer or machine problems. But people STILL bring up the 'dominion changed the votes' lies.
And you are encouraging it with your irresponsible comment. You're feeding the lies, by encouraging a sense of 'uncertantity' when there is NOT uncertantity. The GOP Secretary of State in Georgia just presided over 2 elections which delivered major Democratic wins. Suggesting that he is 'on the take' just illustrates the sheer desperation of the losers of this election will take to cast any shadow of doubt on anyone if it comforts the sting of their loss, even as they know that their wild accusations will never have an end, and now resembles a literal witch hunt. When your cast of enemies has to grow to include the GOP leaders in the Senate, and the VP, both of who have endlessly protected Trump, then you really don't have reality on your side.
I think GOP lawmakers had the right idea to hold some kind of public audit of it. Giuliani had a lot of incorrect / blatantly false facts and so he was dismissed out of hand, but many of his witnesses came across as credible and describe things very differently from your explanations.
Logistically I don't think anyone wanted to back the election fraud argument for political reasons but there is still very much a need for it because plenty of people feel like it was stolen.
As for the President - whether he's making it up or whether he's among those who believe it was stolen, nobody reads minds so you cant know one way or another unless you add your own personal bias into it.
Now you can be very angry about the fraud claims because they are baseless etc and be emotional about it or be a problem solver and recognize that those people are fellow citizens and there is no divorce option. Railing against Trump 24x7 actually makes the problem worse because nobody is going to be persuaded. You can also call me also irresponsible for bringing their concerns up, but what you can't really do without being dishonest is to deny that there are millions who believe this stuff, out of whom a few dozen got mad enough about it want to break in to the Capitol, and succeeded.
The fact remains that the media does a tremendous disservice to the public by not casting a wide tent, and the President capitalised on this because frankly what other option is there if you want to win? The American media hoaxed the public into thinking he called Nazis very fine people when he instead said they should be condemned totally, and was said in the context of the broader debate about statues of controversial historical figures.
Now you can again cheerlead for the media and say they are the finest journalists on the planet, but the fact is that more than half the country doesn't believe them. You can dismiss them all as brainwashed or stupid or whatever you like but they're going to be around for a very long time.
None of this is tantamount to incitement, or sedition. Which is why despite whatever bloviating we're not going to see any prosecutions of public officials (at least not regarding the Republican efforts to contest the election.) This is 2020's version of "Lock Her Up!"
These sorts of rhetorical exaggerations are contributing to the problem, and are scarcely better than the outright lies on the other side.
Stephen Colbert did a great job of bringing this up in his interview with ex-prosecutor Sen. Klobuchar who went straight back to work with her traitor colleagues. She dodged the question of whether more public officials should be prosecuted with a tactful deflection of laying it all on Trump. That bugged me.
This is what a weak coup looks like in 2020 America. None of the action above were based on preserving order or upholding the constitution or fullfilling his oath of office or protecting our democracy or being in the right. It was a power grab doomed from the start, but never the less, a power grab and a sorry attempt at a coup.
I also think calling it a coup inflames tensions and risks credibility for no real benefit. A sober and precise description of events is damning enough.
But of course, whether anything crosses legal lines in accordance to legal vocabulary is all these bent politicians are concerned about, because that's the only thing that would stop them by landing them in jail. That's why most of them are lawyers. The non-lawyers have a hard time surviving. We'll see what happens with Trump.
Both points apply to both sides.
I certainly agree politics is way too corrupt and the constant lawfare is harmful.
Yes it can be, given that Republicans have always framed their arguments in terms of "preventing electoral fraud" and not "overthrowing democracy." You may personally feel like the former is a pretextual cover for the latter but you probably wouldn't be able to prove this in a court of law.
Setting aside completely how I feel because it absolutely does not matter, the question should be, was it the latter or wasn't it?
> but you probably wouldn't be able to prove this in a court of law.
Exactly. And for this to be the standard for how we certify the truth is at the heart of American absurdism. It's how we let politicians, big banks, Wall Street, et al get away with being full of shit. And I am not exaggerating. The partisan impeachment vote, Wells Fargo's fake bank account, and the financial crisis are all examples of absurdism.
Here is Matt Gaetz after the raid. Do you know why they applaud? Because he gave them the well formed arguments they need to get away with betraying their country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfmyACLmZ7s
None of this is an exaggeration.
I am talking about the masterminds and their intent. Trump clearly intended to steal the election. Wells Fargo and Wall Street clearly intended to cheat for profit.
It's as if intent doesn't matter, when it truly is the source and agency of the bad actors. Wrongful intent continues to enjoy protection in America under the "tricky things about the law", to borrow your words.
You shouldn't be able to steal something just because the lawyers agree with you. In America, that's how it's done (probably everywhere else too, but).
Was the "Russian collusion" narrative peddled 24/7 by the mainstream media for over two years a conspiracy theory?
Is what we saw in Portland and at BLM riots not extreme and violent?
This is not just about Republicans.
The trump campaign and admin has made huge efforts to cover up crimes relating to it's behavior with respects to Russia. What exactly are they hiding?
I personally believe it isn't as deep as it seems, but it is also very serious. I don't think Trump is given orders by Russia, or that there was deep cooperation. However, even somewhat of coordination and discussions of sensitive information is criminal.
So yes, the Russian collusion narrative is entirely true. The only reason Trump wasn't charged with obstruction of justice is because of a memo saying they shouldn't charge their boss, not because there isn't enough evidence.
One of the big differences between what happened in Portland and DC is INTENT. The insurrectionists yesterday intended on forcing the joint session to declare Trump the winner of the presidential election. They were attempted to do by force what they failed to do at the ballot box, and at the court house. The fact they were inept and failed does not excuse them at all.
That does not compare even slightly to what happened in Portland. Protests that turns into riots aren't good. However, there was not an intent to overthrow the presidential election there at all.
This kind of whataboutism needs to stop.
Pre-emptive victim posturing to gain sympathy for your argument. Do better.
What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship. When you take away the ability of people to participate in peaceful political discourse, you push them towards violence.
Bullshit. I've deplatformed quite a lot of people. It doesn't happen by accident, someone has to be openly promoting genocide or the like before I'm willing to spend time, effort, and reputational capital in pushing them out of the room.
Half of the American electorate currently feels profoundly unheard.
Why, did they accidentally mute Fox News, OAN, or talk radio? There's an entire industry based around airing the grievances of Trump and the sort of people who support him.
You need to re-read the community guidelines, specifically the 'In comments' section, in the interest of self-improvement and doing better.
And this is now, after people are distracted by social media. American Political discourse died soon after Fox news came on the stage. People seem to have forgotten how that era was because this era is simply worse.
I mean take a look at some of the greatest hits - it was the FOX news cycle that gave credence to creationism and the debate whether Evolution existed worked. Remember "teach the debate"?
This was a level of FUD that completely outperformed previous work which simply distracted or confused over more recent science like climate change.
Here an entirely established piece of science which is used everyday, even now in vaccines - was made invalid.
The divorce from reality was achieved by lots of hard work by ad and content people, along with the news networks.
The sensible response to not being heard is to establish a voice, not to riot. So riots are probably not a sign of that.
Furthermore, claiming deplatforming (a delusion) is the cause of political violence is nothing more than a grotesque distortion and justification.
First definition I found https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deplatform (transitive, formal) deplatform 1: To prevent someone from utilizing a platform to express their opinion.
You think it's worse to interpret a word literally if that literal definition is broad, than it is to interpret a word in a way that makes the other person seem delusional and nonsensical? In the context of a specific conversation, its more reasonable to interpret somebodies words in a way that makes their words make sense, than in a way that makes them sound delusional.
Actually you can, but that's not what I want to get at right now.
The problem is that these people there went to the Capitol for the sake of violence and not for the sake of being heard. What I am going to say is not true about conservatives overall, but definitely true for every single MAGA cultist out there.
They generally have completely baseless opinions and are not ready to discuss anything, have an argument, learn or compromise. This is what democracy is based on: compromise. Therefore, they are fundamentally undemocratic and if you're being honest they are fascists.
So fuck their ability to spout their violent garbage online. These are dehumanizing assholes incapable of discussing with liberals and finding compromise. They just want a dictatorship suppressing and killing liberals, if possible.
Good luck America, you need it.
one question i have is -- are there any topics you believe deserve to be censored by social media? or maybe i should say any "political" topics? like, i guess you'd probably be okay with some kinds of sex work being censored, but i maybe sex work is also a form of politics...
anyway, i guess i'm curious if you're a free-speech absolutist, or, if otherwise, how would you do draw a line to avoid "mass" deplatforming and have it be targeted deplatforming.
Perfect example is reddit banned "the donald" sub and they went on to create thedonald.win. It is now the 430th largest website in the USA per Alexa.
Which turned into a even bigger echochamber than previosuly. At least, while they were on reddit, on the frontpage you were exposed to posts from both sides.
Now each side just browse its own version of the online ghetto, without being exposed to posts from the other side calling out the conspiracy theories, the partially reported news, the plain bullshit.
When The_donald was busy tea bagging the front page to get the submissions titles just right and spelling out something like "own the libs", no great bi-partisan agreement was being reached.
I think it just became clear to the democrat and "left" that the right had stopped caring for years.
This idea that there was a conversation is simply revisionist, and blaming the left is to blame the laggard for imitating the front runner.
No, but it's not like things couldn't be worse, and I don't think that the sort of eliminationist tactics that are being embraced are going to make things better. The left will manage to deplatform the right off of a bunch of major sites but they'll just reconvene elsewhere, out of reach. Will this be good or bad for discourse?
I dare say, so are the natural counter reactions to it.
If it’s unclear, remember the quaint days of the Fox News effect. America was pulling away for a long time, and the right was the first one to realize the political advantage of it.
Frankly I doubt America, especially the American right, can currently sit down and figure out how it got here.
This isn’t an unfair criticism mind you, you can simply see how the right has gone from the river boat (?) days to the tea party to the Trump days of today, to track how hyper partisan it’s become internally.
The media structures at play, such as Fox News, are determined to sell a partisan story.
The Republican Party is so unable to work with the dems that they even rejected “Obama care” - which was built around a Republican program -Romneycare.
This is simply one example, to highlight that what you are seeing is momentum at play.
The machines that spin it up - namely the political:media structures, are fully active.
Plus it’s been frightfully effective for the right.
When Obama came to power, the right had suffered a massive demoralizing loss. They had nothing and were demoralized.
Instead they got together and found strength in sheer force of will and used the term “one term president” to invigorate themselves and fight Obama at every turn.
This dogged will to fight at all costs is impressive, and it resulted in styling Obama, and even gave them Trump.
The Trump years have been amazing for the Republicans and so many core Republican goals have been fulfilled, especially the Supreme Court judges.
The republicans approach simply works. Why wouldn’t the left pick up that lesson?
You’ll even see that the rise of the left in the democrats is a mirror of the same process on the right.
TLDR: sorry man, bipartisanship is long dead in your country.
What should worry you even more - these processes aren’t unique to America. Fully expect to see this same break down around the world.
Also, they don't do crap like this : https://imgur.com/gallery/YM5HM
And this is mild versions of their brigading and tea bagging. What, you think this is ok?
Now you have about a dozen progressive subreddits hitting the front page on a daily basis with nothing more than screenshots of tweets. How is that any better?
Some people will criticize and ridicule that, yes. That's part of free speech. And if everyone is ridiculing you, then perhaps there might be the possibility you're saying ridiculous things?
Now more than ever, anyone can have a voice. A child can make videos unboxing toys and millions will watch. You can tweet, blog, video, write essays, make podcasts and so on. I'm not aware of any point in history when people could be heard more than now.
Every election in the USA. Plenty of countries manage to have a proportional electoral system, where a large fraction of people get to feel appropriately represented.
With such a bipartisan division in politics, it doesn't matter whether the issues were "discussed": there won't be compromise across the centre line.
Our mindset is based around a form of discourse where we stop listening to people when we discover they're using their free speech to lie. Now you don't know who the liars are.
They voted, they lost by 7+ million votes, which they stormed the Capitol to overturn. Why should I have to keep sparing their feelings?
These people need to stop being appeased.
Deplatforming and censorship are only some factors in this process, but there are others. Remember Trump's original claim to "drain the swamp"? In the age of the Internet, anyone who pays attention to politics is overwhelmed by examples of bad behavior from the top guys and gals. People, being partisan creatures, will mostly concentrate on the top guys and gals from the other side, but contemporary democratic world is transparent enough not to let you doubt that the basic institutions are rotten to the core. Once upon a time, random people could have (positive) illusions about what takes place in the palaces of power in Brussel, London, Paris or Washington. Now they know it down to the last dirty detail and I believe that some of them just cannot cope.
At the same time, China notices this and does its utmost to suppress any disagreeing voices within, much more so than 15 years ago. The end result should probably be a curated, polished image of the country and its system with no visible flaws. I doubt that they can sell this to the outside observers, but they may get their own population to believe that without reservations: "we are the champions".
Social media are about emotional impulses and endorphin triggers, not rationality or reality. Conflating the two is undermining societies across the world.
The American right isn't being censored in general. It's a vehicle for disinformation, to a somewhat greater degree than the American left. It's mainly that disinformation that's being censored on social media. In other media: those are as segregated between the two parties as they have been for decades.
As far as de-platforming, review bombing and the like: it's not the right being excluded, it's anyone who doesn't conform to the fringe left's concepts of orthodoxy and political correctness. You know, the "woke" crowd.
What happened at the Capitol was not the result of mass de-platforming and censorship. It was the result of ideological self-isolation, ignorance of historical context (among other things) and blindly parroting partisan talking points without exercising critical thought. This has been happening since Vietnam, before social media or even the Internet were invented. It culminated in the election of Trump, the emergence of Proud Boys, BLM and Antifa, the state of particularly the GOP and yesterday's events.
For all the so-called differences between the two sides in American politics, they share a surprising amount of traits: ideological bubbles, authoritarian leanings, tribal sentiments, demonising the other side, distrust in corporate media and feeling oppressed/disenfranchised. There's at least a hint to the shared American subconscious there.
We need to be very clear here, we're explicitly talking about LESS THAN HALF of the electorate. Donald Trump did not win the popular vote in either presidential election he participated in.
https://projects.propublica.org/politwoops/user/realDonaldTr...
What came to mind when I read this news about Capitol Hill was the famous MLK quote “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Along with the thought that these a mostly middle class white people no doubt. Which are overall a privileged group. So I got to thinking about what it means to be heard in today’s world. I think that for a lot of conservatives in a digital world it can feel like their voice or the voice of people with their beliefs aren’t heard. Certainly you can find little echo chambers of conservatism, but when you go to the big news sites, the front page of Reddit, or Twitter it sure looks like everyone leans left. Couple this with the leader of your movement getting little notes on all his tweets to at what he says isn’t true or getting removed. I can see how it feels like your worldview is getting silenced, hence a riot. So I wonder if these movements by Twitter are ultimately counter productive.
Just a half baked idea, but some food for thought.
We aren't - well, I used to say we weren't - like Communist China, because our ideas could compete in a marketplace of ideas and win out on their merits. Sadly, strong political rhetoric is causing our own media companies to self-censor and in non-transparent ways.
The only problem is that in general most people... aren't attacking them. This persecution complex is almost completely manufactured.
Best example? The War on Christmas. Almost completely fabricated on the evidence. But people feel like they are being pushed to the margins, and there are several leaders fanning these feelings.
And that's not to say there aren't real issues. The middle class is shrinking! Whites are not the majority, just a plurality. The manufacturing world is gutted. The opioid crisis has reversed the upward trend of life expectancy!
But then what do they blame? Feminists. Liberals. Immigrants. Not the actual problems. And being marginalized has more to do with as a bloc them removing themselves from a shared worldview and facts and increasingly becoming more and more unhinged by conspiracy theory thinking.
I also note that military is an interesting mixture of the individualist bravery and the honor of service (non-victimized way of relinquishing control).
Also, you can hardly call it a MITM attack when they are specifically announcing their policy. Your usage of that term implies an underhanded policy designed to hide their intentions and actions. This is clearly not the case.
If the President of the United States is saying something, it is my right and duty to hear exactly what that is, verbatim, so I can appropriately participate in our democracy. It is not at all acceptable for Twitter, Facebook, or any other third party to intercede and decide for me that what they said was good or bad. That is my decision to make. The fact that so many people here are willing and eager to cede that authority to faceless, unaccountable corporations is frankly appalling.
>If you owned a website that allowed public postings, would you ever consider yourself obligated to protect a member of the government's speech in a way you do not for a normal user?
That's an excellent point. This freedom of speech should indeed extend to everyone, not just government officials.
Sure, you do have that right, it is only that it is not the responsibility of Twitter or Facebook to be the avenue through which the President communicates.
Twitter and Facebook have, in my opinion, already bent over backwards trying to let the President say what he wished. The events yesterday basically forced them to make a policy decision: Protect the free speech of a person dangerous to our democracy, who will no longer be in power in a few weeks, or simply wash their hands of him? I am sure it is not too difficult to make a choice given the options.
And in addition to all of this, why in God's name, if I did support your belief in a private corporation's obligaiton to run a private enterprise as a public institution, would I try to protect the President when he has done everything he can to cause __the exact__ incidents that Twitter and Facebook are explicitly denouncing his statements for inciting & supporting?
Claiming that all users are subject to the same rules might have had some merit if he were suspended years ago.
I don't know if I'd really go so far as to say that trump has an easement at this point, but it's not an entirely absurd position.
Moreover, if you actually look at the content they removed I don't think it's by any means an obvious violation of their TOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668883 -- it's certainly less so than plenty of content which they leave up on the site.
Plus every decade IIRC a lesser-known populist gets locked up for inciting a riot that never even occurred.
What else could be more appropriate.
If a person cannot tweet they can still blog, newsletter, email, and even whisper their truth via their free speech to the next person all they like.
Private companies can censor. Censorship isn't the sole domain of the government.
Twitter is censoring the President on its platform. As is their right to do so as Twitter is not the government. At least the last time I checked.
If he always and at all times has unfettered access to a rabid following, there is no moderation, no mediation, and we get our current situation.
Media can and has refused to publish his BS
The media has regularly ignored presidential press conferences they didn't care about for decades now. Bush, Obama, and Trump all had many press conferences that received minimal coverage. In that light, it's no surprise that a President would seek our a more direct line of communication.
- Press releases
- Holding a news conference
- For emergencies, IPAWS
Twitter not carrying his messages is akin to CNN choosing not to broadcast his rallies. It's not censorship.
People on a medium tend to overstate that media’s influence. Newspapers routinely refuse to print politicians’ op eds. Twitter is more pervasive, but it’s far from universal. As long as it’s not fiddled with around elections, de-platforming is fine.
The President does have certain abilities to commandeer media time, but that would require making an official address.
The President is inciting violence by spreading dangerous misinformation and not condemning domestic terrorists.
Our sacred democratic institutions and world standing have taken a big hit. And, even worse - American lives were lost today due to this rhetoric.
We can't continue acting like this is a matter of hurr durr censorship anymore. It's time to move past idealism and into reality: people are in danger. Words have consequences.
We saw today what happens when people with immense power spout extremist ideology for years without consequence.
Let today's action by Twitter be part of the consequence. It's not censorship: it's consequence. Trump will not be arrested or chased for his rhetoric. He simply won't be able to spout it to the masses on a privately owned platform.
A life was lost today. There should be some consequence.
I'm curious what you've been reading or watching that led you to believe that's likely
Can't say I'll feel sorry when section 230 gets absolutely destroyed under Biden - these companies more than earned it.
I say 'not sure' because in the case of personal attacks, for example, obviously there's an extra dimension that it's not very nice for the attacked to see it/know that it's there.
But I don't really like a nanny ~state~ private company telling me I can't have a chuckle at some nonsense that I know isn't going to incite me to do anything, or whatever.
It is Twitter's Twitter to do with what it pleases though.
I wonder what the chain of command was who told these cops to essentially do nothing today. Who does the buck stop with?
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes and all that...
2. The SPD, for a reason they still can't explain, and against the orders of both Mayor Durkan, and Police Chief Best, chose to leave the East Precinct, and then, in a petty manner, stopped responding to calls in the entire Capitol Hill area.
3. The CHAZ occupied a public park, and the streets of the surrounding block. It did not stop the operation of businesses, legislatures, or government. It did not prevent the police from accessing the area.
What we're seeing here, is a failed coup - an attempt to prevent the peaceful, democratic transfer of power by force, at the behest of a politician. I can't believe that you can't tell the difference between a coup, and a protest. One is treason and insurrection, which carries the death penalty, while the other is a constitutionally protected right.
"police say violent crowd prevented access to victims"
I'll believe it when its a citation from an impartial third party - a paramedic, a bystander, etc.
The fact is, the police retained access to both the East Precinct, and to CHAZ, through the latter's existence. They would show up in small groups of two or three, and were allowed in.
I do give a small amount of consideration to the sacredness of the capitol, and the additional damage that images of blood spilled on the steps of our capitol would do.
I understand the rationale could still stand, but wanted to point out that their lack of enforcement did not prevent bloodshed entirely.
No transcript yet, but here's the slug:
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/06/954115945/former-defense-secr...
The fact that a large mob of people like this - many of them armed, and some of them planting explosives - breaking into the Capitol, taking things and causing a bunch of damage, results in only a small handful of arrests is pretty crazy, too.
It's crystal clear that the police have no trouble deescalating violent situations when they want to.
If you've followed the history of protest in this country, you'll find it difficult to believe any of these things. From suffragist, to labour, to the civil rights movement, unarmed left-wing protests are routinely brutalized by police. Armed right-wing protests are not.
When someone is brutalized by another human because they don't have a gun, of course that's because people are being evil! How dare you say they made themselves a victim?
And trying to do self defense with a gun is a terrible idea in most circumstances.
(Though trying to fight government abuse with a gun is also a terrible idea.)
Deciding not to carry around a gun is very different from deciding not to defend yourself. It's not victim mentality.
>And trying to do self defense with a gun is a terrible idea in most circumstances.
statistics say otherwise also statistics cant even capture the self defenses that weren't needed because someone had a gun and could have used it if needed.
>(Though trying to fight government abuse with a gun is also a terrible idea.)
trying to fighting against anyone isn't self defense. no where did I say anything the like you just made that up.
>Deciding not to carry around a gun is very different from deciding not to defend yourself. It's not victim mentality. You are seem unable to completely read and understand my post. You cant just pick one part and ignore the rest. I clear said that if you cant defend yourself its not the same as if you voluntary dont want to. There are many valid reasons why you would not carry a gun and so if you dont have one you obliviously cant us it. Not the same as if you want to have guns removed from anyone so people no longer have a choice.
I'm not sure what the 'no' refers to?
Your original post said "the gov or literally anyone". Your second post only talked about the gov part, so I reminded you about the "literally anyone" part. Where's the misinterpretation?
> trying to fighting against anyone isn't self defense. no where did I say anything the like you just made that up.
Let me rephrase. Self defense against the government with a gun is a terrible idea.
> You are seem unable to completely read and understand my post. You cant just pick one part and ignore the rest. I clear said that if you cant defend yourself its not the same as if you voluntary dont want to.
You did say that. You also equated choosing not to carry a gun with choosing not to defend yourself, with the phrases "Who would have thought that people with guns are less likely to be brutalized by the gov or literally anyone." and "their own actions or inactions makes them the victim"
Are you telling me you didn't mean to equate those? If so then your original post was written misleadingly, and I don't even know who you're even accusing of victim mentality anymore.
If you did mean to equate those, then I still think your opinion is hot garbage.
A mob literally broke into the Capitol Building
Even without comparing to BLM, the actions of the people that raided the Capitol should be condemned on their own. There is no need to bring in BLM as a crutch to make the case. It just makes it less weaker than it is.
This is an assault on democracy. We don't need to explicitly cite double standards to make our case. Stop comparing what's going on on the Capitol with BLM protests.
Turns out the violence had nothing to do with it, which was obvious all along of course. But it’s good to know for sure.
We can discuss that in the context of police use/force - not in the context of taking down democracy.
In Bellevue, the police did neither, and instead, talked with the protesters, and there was no looting anywhere near the protest areas.
If you actually cared about minimizing looting, you should probably not attack peaceful protestors on public streets. The chaos that starts is what gives looters cover to operate.
Also as you imply, why would being treated poorly by a public servant (the police) justify the looting of an unrelated private party? It doesn’t. One is not a justified cause for the other.
https://twitter.com/cevansavenger/status/1346920924310867968
Those people are being let past a barrier to where a lot of other people already are. So it doesn't look like they are getting let in to a restricted area.
Maybe we're just seeing the police manage crowd flow.
Without some context I don't see that this shows anything bad happening here.
It's a bit amazing this video is being peddled around HN as evidence of anything; there is so little context.
(Not knowing the area/layout/etc. as I said) I just see the latter, with it implied they're about to rush up the steps, but where they go (there or otherwise) unshown.
What is amazing is that everything has been filmed and yet people still disagree with what is being seen .
Unless by the "right word" you meant "how they should be called". But then it becomes a highly subjective question.
Obviously the executive branch police forces were held back. There’s a reason why they are pulling in the New Jersey State Police.
And this killing sure looks like it was part of CHOP: https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/murder-charges-filed-a...
Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform
And incitement of violence has never been protected speech. This has gone too far.
> censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
Nothing here says it's only censorship if done by the government. Legally in the USA there's a stark distinction between government & non-governmental censorship. Even then sometimes private entities fall under restrictions like in the case of the FCC & public broadcast networks (see Janet Jackson nip slip, the inability to curse during certain TV/radio programs at certain times, etc). Now whether all of this desirable or not is politically debatable & one we should have. That being said under the current legal structure Twitter is probably in the clear.
I'm generally more curious how these kinds of actions by tech companies don't violate section 230 though. In the early days of the WWW, that was the reason given for not moderating such speech - "if we start moderating any speech then we're not a safe harbor and we have to moderate all speech". Does this mean that these tech companies that are doing moderation expose themselves legally somehow? Or does it just mean that the previous arguments were done in bad faith? Or were there laws passed to refine section 230 in this regard?
Oxford English Dictionary definition:
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/censorship
Nothing mentioned about the government at all.
But did you follow your link? It says noun.
Trump is still free to say whatever he likes, and Twitter is still free to moderate its platform.
Do you? Really? Seems like everything would just be a spam-and-troll-filled wasteland...
There's nothing that prevents the President from being one of those trolls, and there's no strong reason for any given platform to give him special treatment forever if he persists in that behavior...
(Which is good, just like having a bouncer at a bar - punching someone in the face may be someone's genuine behavior, but it's not very welcome.)
You're very eager to weaken the private property rights of others, as well as to give a LOT of power to the government (legality as the only consideration) and I don't think these thing would work out for you like you hope.
You can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
You can write any book you want - but no one is under any obligation to publish it for you.
I think it's shocking how Twitter has completely changed course from its "free speech wing of the free speech party" positioning, and I understand why people find it frustrating that you don't have to "choose between being a platform and a publisher". But you don't; that's not the law and it hasn't been the law for over a quarter-century. And that rule has mostly been a very good thing for online speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...
Is the Post Office under an obligation to mail your book to your subscriber list?
No one is asking Twitter to put his messages on their front page, but anything who specifically subscribed should be able to see anything he writes.
No one is asking Twitter to break the law, nor host illegal content of any kind.
More broadly, Twitter is not obligated to keep tweets up from anyone to anyone. It would be rather silly if, for example, all tweets from north america got deleted and people got up in arms accusing it of "censorship" (in a hypothetical scenario where unbeknownst to them, there was a catastrophic infrastructure failure).
From Oxford dictionary: "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."
Silicon valley has done a lot of harm over the last few years, and redefining words to mean things that benefit big tech companies is one of the worst things they have done.
The first ammendment only applies to the government, however the government is not the only institution capable of censorship.
Censorship doesn’t only occur by violation of the first amendment.
Unreasonable: Running into them full force, leaning your shoulder into their jaw and breaking it into three pieces
The line: somewhere in between
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you really did miss my point:
Twitter controls access to a very large audience, only rivalled maybe by Facebook. If you get banned from Twitter, you can't easily go and use a competitor. If there were tens or hundreds of Twitters in the world, then yeah, the "being thrown out of a bar" analogy would hold.
I saved and linked the video in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668883
While I have zero support for Trump supporters, aren't these websites protected by the government with Section 230? This isn't a right granted to these platforms by the constitution either, the fact that these social media are basically shielded from any civil responsibility when it comes user generated content, in fact that what made them thrive at scale... I'm just saying.
I'm sure that it is. [0]
> The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
Enough of the Doublespeak. It’s censorship, albeit by a private entity. When it inevitably happens to the left, I’ll call it censorship then too and I’ll advocate against it.
https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-vi...
> 93% of Black Lives Matter protests have been peaceful
Does not contradict jimbob45's point that "BLM [...] incited a great deal of violence this summer"
Going by the numbers in your URL, 7750 demonstations of which 7% violent = 542 violent demonstrations.
I thought HN discussions were based on facts rather than political biases.
I very much hope they are.
Difference is, if doesn't fit their narrative it is not covered.
It's ok in the sense that they have every legal right to do so. It would lose them a ton of goodwill though, so they probably wouldn't do it. That's the free market at work.
We have an established democratic process to censure (not censor) and if necessary, remove from office elected officials. That is the appropriate venue and the appropriate authority to deal with this, not Twitter.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is important, but not so much because it’s the only way for governments to communicate effectively with citizens. That’s absurd.
Government has long had the power to commandeer broadcast media when it needs to get a message to the people ("We interrupt this broadcast...") Do we want to do away with that?
For all its flaws, the government is still something every citizen of the US has a say in, however small. I'm not willing to trade that for rule by Twitter executives, however well-intentioned they might be at the present moment.
No, it hasn’t (outside of, say, the Emergency Alert System.) Government addresses (“We interrupt this broadcast…”) are a subject of requests for air time, which broadcast networks usually (but not always) grant.
A decent enough basic explanation with some historical examples is here: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/major-networks-carry...
Generally, yes, I want private entities to decide whether or not to relay government messages. (The government should have its own facilities for basic necessary operational communication via the post, common carrier phone systems, etc., of course.)
The alternative is to surrender freedom of speech in favor of government direction of media.
There’s a very narrow space of cases where, with appropriate procedural safeguards, which start with legislation determining the need and setting the conditions of use, the government ought to be able to direct messages over private infrastructure that isn’t common-carrier; that role is pretty much covered by the Emergency Alert System [0] in the US.
[0] https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/practitioners/integr...
Delivering government messages does not preclude you from also delivering contradictory messages from others. Freedom of speech would involve delivering all messages, not just the ones you like. Requirement to deliver messages != direction of the media.
No, my freedom of speech and the press means I don’t relay speech or use my press to reproduce messages I don’t think deserve to be relayed.
That’s pretty well established to be the meaning of that freedom.
> Requirement to deliver messages != direction of the media.
Yes, the state mandating that I use my resources (such as a printing press, or its digital analog) to reproduce and disseminate messages I disagree with relaying is direction of the media and (outside the usual strict scrutiny terms for restrictions on essential liberty) a violation of my First Amendment rights.
1) The content of calls is not pushed to a dashboard mixed in with things you want to hear algorithmically. This core discovery feature of Twitter means that the content of the messages from people you are not subscribed to must meet some basic criteria of acceptability, or no one would use it.
2) We had common-carrier status applied to ISPs for a few short years before Ajit Pai got that rolled back for Verizon. You might have been able to extend that logic to Twitter and then I could see that as a fair comparison if that was how they were operating. But Twitter would never acquiesce to such an onerous mandate and would lobby hard against it.
If "This is a message from the President of the United States" does not meet the criteria of being something that a user might want to hear, what the hell does? And if the President is saying something completely insane then it's even more important that the people can hear exactly what he says! What would you prefer - you hear the President say an insane thing and you can say "yep, that guy is insane we need to get rid of him" or Twitter tells you "look, uh, just trust us this guy is insane, don't listen to him". In the second scenario, Twitter has all the power, and makes all the decisions about who gets to be an elected official, not you.
> We had common-carrier status applied to ISPs for a few short years before Ajit Pai got that rolled back for Verizon. You might have been able to extend that logic to Twitter and then I could see that as a fair comparison if that was how they were operating. But Twitter would never acquiesce to such an onerous mandate and would lobby hard against it.
"That's not currently how it is" and "Twitter wouldn't like it" don't strike me as particularly good reasons for not having a neutral carrier that accurately tells people the things their elected officials say.
If they changed their business practices to the model used by other network service providers commonly afforded neutral carrier status (i.e. SaaS, ISPs), then I think there might be a case for your second point.
Twitter is a publisher except for purposes of civil liability, and that only because Section 230 specifically, in an effort to promote largely automated, highly scalable, actively curated publication online, specifically exempts them and other similar online publishers from the liability treatment otherwise applicable to publishers.
Why would freedom of speech involve delivering all messages to you, including the ones you don't want? What a strange concept of freedom that involves ceding control to others.
no and luckily for you it cannot, because if the President of the US wants to speak on public matters he can do so through the White House press room.
However Donald J Trump, despite the fact that he thinks he is somehow synonymous with "The United States government", which he is not, can be thrown off any private platform that deems that necessary. Some people might have forgotten it over the last four years, but Donald Trump and his personal twitter account, and the office of the presidency, are not the same thing.
The US govt doesn't need Twitter to communicate with its citizens.
The fact that there was hate speech by a user, in this case the President, means that Twitter acted in support of its broader platform. It has no obligation to the President or to support his preferred communication platform for hate speech.
I don’t think the state has the Constitutional power to compel private parties to relay what officials say outside of exceptional cases, because of freedom of speech and the press.
The right to hear isn’t the right to commandeer others resources to have it relayed to your hearing.
One of those should be to refrain from using their power as a transmitter of information to manipulate the relationship between the people and their government. Maybe here, they have some noble purpose, do we trust that in the future they always will? Maybe in the future they would delete the accounts of Senators who call for antitrust investigations into Twitter. Who knows? Once they have the power, do you trust them to use it only for things you agree with?
A right to hear without any mechanism to enforce it is pointless.
We place reasonable restrictions on companies that serve the general public to ensure they treat all members of the public fairly. You can't decide not to serve certain customers because you don't like their skin color or religion, for example. Another reasonable requirement for a communications company would be that they accurately relay the communications that their users send, without interfering with or manipulating them to serve the company's own purposes.
This is like the Post Office deciding not to deliver mail.
> And incitement of violence has never been protected speech.
I saw an incitement to protest, but I saw nothing encouraging violence. Do you have an links to anything like that?
Twitter isn’t a government corporation with a legally-mandatory monopoly, so, no, its more like me choosing not to pass on something I got from a politician a disagree with.
If freedom of speech and the press is curtailed precisely because the speaker or publisher has a large audience so the curtailment most efficiently gives government control of messaging, that doesn’t make it better.
Because, like a newspaper, they provide an actively curated compilation of information received from a variety of contracted sources to readers. Sure, much (but not all) of the curation is algorithmic, and the direct sources are mostly not under employment contract and not getting paid money for the content (either providing it for free or paying money for reach), while for most newspapers many of the direct sources would be under employment contract and they and others would be getting paid money for the input they provide into the curated product, but that difference doesn't seem particularly relevant to whether Twitter is a publisher. And, yes, a lot of the algorithmic curation is driven by explicit reader expression of preference, and some of the rest is driven by inferred reader preference from reader behavior. But that the curated product is highly personalized also doesn't seem relevant to how free expression rights apply to curation choices.
For purposes of civil liability, Twitter is not a “publisher” solely because of Section 230, but since we are discussing how the Constitution applies to them (which Congress could not change by statute) not how civil liability applies to them, that's not relevant.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/part-IV/chapter-3...
As it happens I wrote an essay on this yesterday: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/google-censors-talkradio , in response to an other act of corporate censorship.
My argument was that because of network effects there are only a few dominant platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and that when these platforms take down content, they are in practise preventing that person's message from getting out, i.e. censoring people.
This gives them a lot of power: power to decide which ideas can be disseminated, power to decide which politicians can get elected. So if you favour democracy, you have to be against the power of big tech platforms to shut down discussions they don't like.
(My favoured solution would involve mandate interoperability using ActivityPub and similar protocols, which breaks the dominance of big platforms due to network effects).
I'm not sure that a communications network passing on their users' communications would amount to treason.
But let's run with that for instance, and assume it did, in law.
> Do they have a right to demur?
Clearly if a course of action is against the law, they have a legal obligation not to do it. True by definition.
As to whether they have a moral obligation, that's another question entirely, and a rather complex one, as one would have to define what is moral. I would say that a company that wishes to continue operating in a country is going to have to obey the laws of that country.
> Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in?
Well, that all depends on whether transmitting other people's messages constitutes a crime. Realistically, no company is going to do things that would get it shut down (and if they did, they wouldn't do so for long).
Can you explain what it not being censorship has to do with freedom of speech not being the same thing as entitlement to a platform?
Whatever your position on this issue, it is certainly alarming that on hackernews intellectual arguments over the meaning of a word are sent down the memoryhole.
Doublespeak is really becoming an issue in our society, and a subset of our population is censoring those that point it out.
Shortsighted.
The problem with censorship is that ###### and that you cant #####. There is also no way to argue why you agree/disagree with it because #######.
What a wild selective (mis)reading of his Twitter account. Did you miss the parts where he said he loved the people who stormed the Capitol with rifles today? Or the part where he said the vice president should just declare him the winner of the election?
>Did you miss the parts where he said he loved the people who stormed the Capitol with rifles today?
He never said that that that's just total nonsense not even misinterpretation that straight made up BS. You could just as well says he said he loves rapists because it happens to be that at least one of the person at the protest was a convicted rapist. If that's how you interpret things from someone you dont like you have a serious problem with reality.
Hes speech was to the people who attender the protest not specifically to thous who entered the building which obviously where a minority. And even if he included the people who entered the building he did not encourage them in any way to do anything they should not do, in fact if he includes them he too told them to go home peacefully.
That's as clear and unambiguous as it gets.
I also said a hundred positive things to many other people.
They need to do a lot more then this.
(And that cuts both ways, daily there is anti-religious hatred on reddit's front page, or covid quacks on twitter). Falsehoods get more clicks then the truth, and they have been ridding that.
Driven by divise events like this; a group of popular figures and their followers will leave omnibus social media in favour of platforms aligned with their political views.
For example: Right-wingers leave Twitter for Parler, Youtube for Bitchute.
Ultimately social media will be a bit like newspapers; each outlet with their own particular affiliation and no single dominant outlet.
Also, I cannot understand brandishing those people that entered the Capitol as "terrorists", again this coming from the mainstream media. I think the exact same speech was made by the Chinese communist media in regards to the Hong Kong protesters who had occupied the territory's legislative chamber.
Just kidding. Sounds like a good day to invest in Parler.
If I were President Trump I would've ordered the creation of an official US government Social Media site and used that. Alternatively, I would've used Mastodon.
The two most recent visible tweets are:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 4h I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 4h Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!
> "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!"
Tweet in question was: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469288825958850...
Not just me claiming this, many people in the hn megathread saw it too and mentioned it too. E.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25663164
> I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.
> It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us, from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people.
> We have to have peace, so go home. We love you, you’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel, but go home and go home in peace.
ABC News mirror on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AeI6Mv0ALg and their own site: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/home-love-trump-protes...
"But but but my favorite politician is not an orange racist fascist Nazi piece of shit", you'll probably say, but that doesn't matter. Imagine him being silenced anyway, because "Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform", and the platform owners might suddenly decide that it is in their political interest to silence their political opponents.
Would you still honestly think that it is perfectly fine?
I'm not overly concerned since politician I support don't encourage their supporters to attack democratic institutions.
Trump being held to the same rules as everyone else[0] by a private party despite being a politician is basically the OPPOSITE of the government having so much power that even private parties will silence people the government doesn't like. So yes, I think it's VITALLY important to protect the rights of private Americans to NOT have to be mouthpieces for the government if they disagree.
[0] well, actually, he's still getting some kid gloves, but it's an improvement
1) there's the facist counter-argument "you shouldn't be able to silence the government," where the government having the ability to force me to repeat what they say scares me more than a company saying "I won't republish that"
2) there's this one, the "what if it was your favored politician"; this is pretty old news; not everything every politican says is published in every news outlet, editorial selection is as old as time, and we have to hope that there is enough competition in the market that things that resonate with lots of people find publishers (if anything, right now we seem to be suffering from being way beyond this, where we even have a lot of publishers for straight garbage nonsense). But this particular instance is an extra-weak-sauce one: nobody NEEDS twitter. Especially not the president!
3) and there's another angle where I think it's important that people act in line with their beliefs, not just with their wallets or their ad view counts, in order to preserve our democracy. There will always be bad actors. Trump is a bad actor. We can't simply throw up our hands and say "we have to accept all the bad actors because we might not always get it 100% right if we try to fight the bad actors." That supposed cure - doing nothing - is worse than the disease!
"Is this person a dangerous nutjob who cares more about their own power than the health of the country" is one of those things that affects which politicians I support, so I'm not TERRIBLY worried about politicians I support falling into this particular trap. Since I believe this is an exceptional moment, I think exceptional action is warranted and am less concerned with supposed precedent. Twitter and Facebook spent 5 years being huge enablers for Trump, even though they never liked his politics, after all, going back to the start of his campaign. Clearly they're willing to tolerate a LOT.
For now, the situation plays into your liking, because you think 'Trump is a bad actor'. But what would you sing when you'll be supporting the bad actor?
Simple example: Russian opposition is considered 'bad actors' in Russia by privately owned (by friends of Putin) tech giants, and is silenced on local social media.
Imagine a world where the online speech is shaped to the liking of a platform owner. It will logically lead to winning elections and forming government by the side supported by such platform, which will of course stay private to legally censor anti-government speech, which, in turn, will make replacement of said government nearly impossible via elections. If you don't see any problems with that, well, I rest my case.
I'd sign up for their mailing list.
Now remember that someday the tables will turn. Someday the bad orange man‘s side will have control of the media, and I expect you to support when they suppress the other side’s speech just as it was done to them today. Because we all know freedom of speech is good except when the other side has it.
For the record, I lean conservative/libertarian on most issues
> Twitter allows the accounts of 99% of republicans to go completely uncensored.
Well that’s damn good of them.
Twitter's censorship is just one aspect of the issue. Talented philosophers, scientists, etc. are being excluded from mainstream society (forced out of their education, employment, etc.) for having the wrong opinions. Many of the smartest people I know exist almost entirely outside of established institutions. Not a good situation. Very sad that people have so much respect for those in power.
I happen to feel the same way about his predecessor. But I always supported Obama‘s use of the bully pulpit. Even though I agreed with very little of his core politics, I feel it’s the right of the president to use freedom of speech, period.
Also, regarding morality. Because I believe in freedom of speech, I support the right of people to write and say immoral things. Even reprehensible things. And if we choose to suppress such speech, we should expect it to go underground and fester and explode painfully at the worst possible time.
Much better in my view that these things be examined and rebutted in the public sphere.
If I was a lawyer I would have done that if that's what I was employed to do.
Hayes code seems irrelevant: what was being discussed was people feeling less positive about censorship when those who they thought were moral were being censored (rather than those thought to be immoral).
> would you have defended the neo-nazis right to march down Skokie's Main Street where tons of Holocaust survivors settled down after escaping Germany?
I would do it in a heartbeat. Of course I detest racism. Of course I think those marches were an act of evil. But the test of a freedom-loving people is how we protect the despised, not how we protect the majority. If we don't protect the freedoms of those we dislike, we will lose our own freedoms soon enough.
It's not about the people we dislike, it's about how those people - or anyone - acts, and the results of those actions. I still disapprove regardless of who it is who wants to march under a Nazi banner.
Maybe society should have concerns not only along the lines of freedom. Or at least, to integrate both positive and negative liberty. Other Western democratic nations have balanced freedom and dignity quite well.
For example, I tend to be slightly on the side of the death penalty. That means I have to imagine that a loved one of mine could be falsely accused of a crime and be executed for it. It would be morally reprehensible for me not to imagine all consequences of something I believe in.
Likewise, anyone against the death penalty should imagine the case, for example, where their own children are killed and the murderer isn’t punished similarly.
There are usually principle of arguments on both sides and I feel it’s important for me to account for them.
I'm not interested in the red-v-blue argument disguised as "this is (not) censorship", nobody's fooled.
Furthermore, they didn't give the sitting POTUS a chance to de-escalate the situation.
If his tweets are causing problems, then send them to a moderator queue and have a discussion with him about what he is saying, don't slap duct tape over his mouth.
Provide a contact method for him to discuss the tweets with whoever is making the decision to silence him.
Twitter has been working with him and his people for months to cut down his rhetoric.
For months his tweets have been flagged by Twitter. He has even been suspended for short durations.
In short, Twitter has already taken these steps. Those didn’t work and now here we are.
The POTUS will be able to appear on any mass media, the only difference is that the media that he will appear likely will be moderated. When he says something, there would be a few people commenting on it and analysing it. This someone could be someone from CNN/FOX/Breitbart etc, so anyone can choose their own moderator that they trust.
This is essentially removing the unchecked propaganda channel of a politician that is causing real life problems.
I wouldn't say "against". Rehab will be hard, but the life and health of those 70M Americans will improve by this move. Those poor people were basically suffering from a chronic poisoning of chortisol for 4 whole years of non-stop artificial outrage
Edit: It may be fun to downvote and might make some feel great for a period of time, but it doesn't change the fact that the President of the country of free speech is being censored.
This reads as a Slippery slope argument
Apologies if you misunderstood.
You can look up respected legal scholars from Georgetown who came to This conclusion during Clinton’s impeachment
You talk about censorship but would allow Trump to censor Twitter if he got to decide what they publish.
And that would be unconstitutional.
This includes every single Hacker News moderator.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you posted this four times. Doing that kind of thing will get you banned here. Also, it looks you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle, and we ban accounts that do that, irrespective of what your ideology is. If you'd please review the rules and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.
This is a site for curiosity. People can't both be curious and battling enemies at the same time. The nervous system doesn't work that way.
Twitter holds the power, but do they not also by definition hold the responsibility of the content on their platform when it costs lives?
> ... noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
I’d be shocked if even this court went so far as to mandate a private company devote its resources to providing content that violates its own rules.
Perhaps grab a mirror and look for some personal responsibility?
Twitter is not the U.S. government's property.
(Or he could post a message to the White House website.)
Trump can dial up Fox News and be on the air in 10 minutes.
Not what most people would consider "silenced".
Also, he's currently the president of the united states. Was the president of the united states completely unable to communicate with the country before twitter?
It's unfortunate that it may require more effort than just his thumbs, but I'm certain the title he holds at times calls for a bit more.