Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump | Hacker News Reader

Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump

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1,961 pointsminimaxir1,950 comments

This ban seems to heavily take advantage of the current moment, as it's obvious that he has tweeted worse things in the past.

It's strange that they picked such a poor way to justify the ban when they could have made a significantly stronger case, and in doing so could have convinced millions more people that they are trying their best to apply policies evenly. For example, I have a hard time imagining why they chose to specifically quote "American Patriots", as if that somehow contributes to the straw that broke the camel's back. Perhaps they have a strategic reason for going about this how they did, but I think it will have some negative 2nd/3rd order effects. that they haven't yet realized.

I imagine we are still only in the early days of the conflicts that are to come in this sphere (and I'd include just about every company and political faction in them, unfortunately).

(Also because apparently I have to state this explicitly in every comment related to Trump: I do not support Trump, his supporters, the recent events that occurred at the capitol, etc etc)

I think the logic isn't that hard.

Person says bad things to whip up a mob - Twitter unsure to take him seriously or literally.

Mob actually materializes and several people die - Twitter sure they now have to take him literally

I think its easier to ban him based on political justification than it would be to ban in in a post-presidency. I also think they are less than interested in enduring his antics as a former president considering how much he abuses the court system to get his way.

It's really important realize this distinction. Imagine a newspaper printing a letter to the editor from a person whose words have previously incited a riot.

I find it surprising that they enabled the account again at all after the 6th.

In the terrorism of the 60s through to the 90s a common demand in hostage situations was to have a letter read out in the media. The PFLP would do it, the Red Army Brigades, even the Unabomber demanded his manifesto be printed

They needed to take hostages to get published because most media wouldn't air their messaging because of their support of violence

In the modern age they'd all have free platforms and likely amplification.

If they had a platform, wouldn’t they then not need to resort to violence to get their message heard?

It seems like those are examples of censorship driving individuals to violence.

You also can't rule out that if they had a platform, they'd use it to incite others to resort to violence on their behalf. For example, the Unabomber's manifesto expresses his belief that violence was necessary to provoke revolution against the technological society. The Unabomber's bombings were the "pre-violence" required to get his ideas out there, of which of which a violent revolution was one.

Agreed. It doesn’t seem obvious to me whether or not censoring results in less violence in the parent’s examples.

Maybe it is obvious to those more well read on them.

Censorship driving people to violence in this case is much like a girl being pretty driving a goon to rape. The cause of the act in both cases is the perpetrators warped sense of ownership. Specifically ownership of other's thoughts, body, and time. They would feel entitled to that ownership whether met with resistence or not. In this case censorship seems reasonable otherwise you end up tacitly fostering the perpetrators view of ownership with your submission.

Given Trumps comments about women and Giuliani getting caught with his hands down their. The statement "not able to keep his hands in his pocket" is super on point.

Your account has been using the site primarily (exclusively even?) for political and ideological battle. That's the line at which we ban accounts, regardless of which politics or ideology they're battling for (see [1] for more explanation). We have to, because it destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation, not smiting enemies.

I've therefore banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. The rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I believe they did so to fire a warning shot, to be able to argue later that they were not banning immediately. I bet they knew that guy wouldn’t be able to keep his thumbs in his pockets – and that’s 100% on him.

He literally told people to stay peaceful...

> He literally told people to stay peaceful...

It's not like that's all he said...

>> He literally told people to stay peaceful...

> It's not like that's all he said...

Update: it sounds like Trump is now regrets telling people to stay peaceful:

https://nyti.ms/3ot6MhR:

> At the White House, Mr. Trump struck a defiant tone, insisting that he would remain a potent force in American politics as aides and allies abandoned him and his post-presidential prospects turned increasingly bleak. Behind closed doors, he made clear that he would not resign and expressed regret about releasing a video on Thursday committing to a peaceful transition of power and condemning the violence at the Capitol that he had egged on a day before [emphasis mine].

Yeah, and so did Charles Manson, who also never laid a hand on anyone.

Yes, in the tweets that stayed up.

This a big reason why I dislike censorship. It distorts everything, and removes evidence.

Which is why interpretation of speech requires context.

Yelling "fire" in an open field vs a packed cinema are obviously are easy to interpret. There's a whole bunch of grey area in the middle.

And that grey area is admittedly harder to give context to when the medium for it is text....but since he's the president and he's been physically SAYING falsehoods that lead to this situation, he should have been banned sooner.

So any politician that states a falsehood on Twitter should be banned? Or just U.S. presidents?

The amount of harm caused by a lie is proportional to the size of the audience who hears it

As well as the authority of the person spreading it. The fact that we've decided the President is above libel, slander, and felony charges is a new thing. Thank god people stopped this nonsense when he started advocating terrorism. Equality under the law, implies MORE scrutiny for the powerful. Unfortunately, up until this point we have normalized the opposite.

It seems like most societies have some kind of a reflex towards monarchy. We elect our leaders but still treat them in many ways like monarchs who need to be revered rather than like people we hired to do a job for us.

Falsehoods that lead to this situation. People who post beheadings on Twitter should be banned. People who incite violence should be banned. Nothing was said about U.S. Presidents.

“Statements that are false” are an entirely different ballpark of discussion than “statement that incite violence”. Likely, some of the statements that incited these crowds weren’t even false statements at all, but imperative directions (be strong, go to capital) or predictions that turned out to be completely true. (Going to be wild!)

The root of all this were the lies he has been spreading to undermine election security and this confidence in the results since long before election day.

> “Statements that are false” are an entirely different ballpark of discussion than “statement that incite violence”.

No they're not, instead they have a massive overlap. If I lie to my neighbor "Hey, Bob across the street has been stealing your mail", and my neighbor punches Bob in the face, my "statement that was false" led to violence and it can be argued that was my intention the whole time.

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”[0]

While King Henry II didn’t directly ask for the priest to be killed, it’s pretty clear that was the intention.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

Yelling Fire is "Holmes' famous quote comes in the context of a series of early 1919 Supreme Court decisions in which he endorsed government censorship of wartime dissent — dissent that is now clearly protected by subsequent First Amendment authority." [1]

Holmes would later reverse his own ruling yet this quote will never die even though it has no bearing on actual law today and in realty "yelling Fire" would likely be protected speech

Remember "After Holmes' opinions in the Schenck trilogy, the law of the United States was this: you could be convicted and sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act if you criticized the war, or conscription, in a way that "obstructed" conscription, which might mean as little as convincing people to write and march and petition against it. This is the context of the "fire in a theater" quote that people so love to brandish to justify censorship." [1]

That is not a position one should be supporting if they value free Speech

It's Time to Stop Using the 'Fire in a Crowded Theater' Quote [2] Three Generations of a Hackneyed Apologia for Censorship Are Enough [1]

[1] https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

really discouraging to see this come up again and again. every time, someone posts this article and people ignore it to continue arguing in the other subthreads. thanks for posting the correction; I hope eventually we can stop having this conversation here.

The phrase “fire in a packed theater” in the legal context is actually based on a case where someone was jailed for peacefully protesting the draft for WW1 (Schenck v. United States). It has no relation to actual violence, and is in fact a fantastic example of how “harm” by speech can be abused by a malicious government to jail people for what should be protected speech.

It’s no longer good law, thank goodness. Now we have the much narrower Brandenburg test, which requires that speech be likely to cause “imminent lawless action”.

I think it's simpler than this. There will likely be an inquiry, and "enablers" may be held to account. This potentially includes social media platforms such as Twitter.

As they should be, equality under the law should include the President. And the things he said were not protected speech.

They were protected speech, even if lies.

I thought the term "protected speech" usually means speech that is protected from government censorship by the 1st Amendment. But I'm not sure that has any bearing in this context since government censorship isn't involved here.

Sedition, terrorism, and advocating the overthrow of the government ARE NOT PROTECTED SPEECH

In the US, they are actually protected speech unless relating to an imminent threat. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seditious_libel#Seditious_spee...

Just to clarify (belatedly), my point was that whether or not it's protected speech doesn't matter when we're discussing Twitter - because Twitter isn't beholden to the 1st Amendment. They are free to block speech even if it is "protected."

Michael Sherwin, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, told the Associated Press: "All of those charges [sedition, unauthorized access, theft of federal property] are on the table... We’re not going to keep anything out of our arsenal for potential charges. We will bring the most maximum charges we can based upon the conduct." https://apnews.com/article/arrests-district-of-columbia-crim...

Additionally I believe wholesale banning the leader of a country from a platform like twitter is not black or white. Their persona is different and requires different treatment than any other given account.

I suspect two factors went into the calculus this time: he has proved himself desperately dangerous AND he's got less than 2 weeks left in his term.

I don't disagree. But sedition isn't protected speech. So if they didn't ban him they're opening themselves up for lawsuits. In no country on earth is it legal for anyone to publicly advocate the overthrow of their government. And there's already decisions on the books proving this, as well as the legal precedent of cold-war anti-communism laws.

Point out the sedition.

listen to his speech inciting his followers to go to the capitol. You can decide if it’s sedition or not, but the end result is undeniably an insurrection, and his words are what directly invited them to do this.

He has been laying the ground work for this since at least last summer to hedge against an election loss. He has been sitting baseless accusations about mail-in ballots, solve he knew Democrats would be more likely to vote by mail because they took the pandemic seriously. What was the "stop the steal" slogan supposed to accomplish other than create the overthrowing of the legitimately elected president? If he had legal ground he wouldn't have needed a slogan, but just won his court battles.

Your assertions are wrong.

No one has looked at the present election based off claims 8 months ago, people witnessed openly irregular behavior during the actual election and after.

The current fervor around silencing, labeling, and berating rather than reassuring fears and assisting in auditing to legitimize the election is a significant problem and not a healthy look.

The fact that there even is a discussion about whether what he's saying really is sedition is enough. They're a private company, that just opens them up to way too much liability. It's not their responsibility to be a platform for all sides, for better or for worse

Twitter was very happy when after vote fraud in other countries it was helping to promote revolutions, several years ago. Section 230 specifically frees them from responsibility if they behave as a platform and opens to much more liability if they decide to filter out some speech.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

You should read Section 230. It doesn’t say that if you filter some speech that you have liability. In fact it says quite the opposite: if you make a good faith effort to filter some speech then you aren’t liable.

Sorry, I meant to say: You aren’t liable for good faith efforts to filter speech. It doesn’t say anything about being liable forever more.

Thank you, i was misremembering the description of how someone wanted to change section 230 as the actual section 230.

Sedition is in fact protected speech. One of the things that makes the US is a great country is our robust free speech protections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seditious_libel#Seditious_spee...

As long as it does not indicate an "imminent" threat You are correct, I was to broad.

They still let the Ayatollah Tweet.

This. Double standards all the way.

Care to elaborate? Are they violating sanctions?

I’m not sure of any other time Twitter did the banning of it’s own volition.

But one might reasonably argue that people who don’t follow certain ideologies get reported and suspended more often.

Is there a tweet from his account that violates twitters ToS?

https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1263551872872386562

"The only remedy until the removal of the Zionist regime is firm, armed resistance."

https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1263181288338587649

"We will support and assist any nation or any group anywhere who opposes and fights the Zionist regime."

Now compare that to the Trump tweets that prompted his suspension, according to the Twitter statement:

"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!"

"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."

To claim that the second set of Tweets incites violence more than the first is absurd. Yes, context matters, but it also matters for the Ayatollah tweets. When the leader of Iran advocates "armed resistance" to the state of Israel, we know exactly what that means.

Isn't it just bluster on the part of the Ayatollah? Do you think it at all likely to inspire action?

Trump on the other hand has clearly demonstrated his ability to incite action.

How are Khamenei's tweets any different from those of US politicians against Iran or other "enemy" nations? Should we apply the same standard to US politicians who have tweeted threats to Iran or supported actions aimed to the collapse of Iranian regime?

Come on, Twitter has been banning plenty of users for posting blatantly anti-Semitic dog-whistles like "the Zionist regime". It's quite clear that Khamenei is getting preferential treatment.

"Zionist regime" is not an anti-semitic "dogwhistle" (trendy term used to assign words whatever meaning you like, disregarding the literal one). It's a derogatory appellative for a country. Zionism is a political ideology and Israel is a country engaged in blatant apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism

So in this case he might be technically correct in identifying the exact people he opposes... Possibly.

Iran is a bit weird, they actually have a seat of parliament reserved for a Jewish representative. See here for details of the current holder of this seat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Motamed

> Come on, Twitter has been banning plenty of users for posting blatantly anti-Semitic dog-whistles like "the Zionist regime". It's quite clear that Khamenei is getting preferential treatment.

Twitter overtly adopted rules granting high government officials this preferential treatment to justify not acting on the many complaints of Trump's flagrant violation of what were previously nominally universally applicable rules on the platform at the outset of his term.

So, yes, Khamenei gets preferential treatment compared to the average user (as did Trump); that's the overt policy.

Those aren’t the tweets that got Trump suspended.

He tweeted praise for the rioters and justified the riot while the riot to stop the constitutional process of the peaceful transfer of power was in progress.

In this tweet he says "death to American politicians":

https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1093791374204420097

He can say march on the Capitol all he wants. If a mob shows up then you can bet your ass he’ll be off the platform.

It's not so much about the words as the material consequences of those words.

That's a bad line to draw. "We're helpless to do anything until someone dies" isn't likely to draw a lot of sympathy.

That seems like a great place to draw the line to me.

Isn’t that the way laws work? You can’t prosecute someone until they’ve committed a crime. The issue here is whether the “crime” is tweeting stuff that starts an insurrection, or tweeting stuff that could be interpreted as potentially starting an insurrection.

Me telling someone to go fuck themselves probably isn’t a problem, but me telling someone with learning difficulties to go fuck themselves and them feeling compelled to do it and hurting themselves probably is a problem.

> You can’t prosecute someone until they’ve committed a crime.

technically yes, but attempting a crime is often considered a crime itself.

Oh well, there's hundreds of tweets by US politicians threatening violence against other nations (Iran or N.Korea or Syria). That's what nations do, right?

Recall last year when the rioting was going on and Kaepernick was calling for more violence on Twitter? @Jack gave him $3m.

When did the Ayatollah advocate for the abolition of his own government?

Well, 1978, although I am not saying I agree with the equivalence.

That ayatollah died in 1989...

'ayatollah' is a title, not a name...

Right, the person who now has that title was involved in the revolution, but thank you for sharing, maybe that is a new fact to someone.

my bad, I thought khomeini was the one being referenced. I guess it should be more specific, given how many have the title ?

No worries, I agree it is less clear than it could be, given the shift in time between question and answer.

According to Twitter's public statement, Trump's rule violation was incitement of violence, not "advocating for the abolition of his own government."

The Ayatollah has repeatedly tweeted in support of the violent destruction of the state of Israel. If that's not incitement of violence, I don't know what is.

Reminder that trump did and said the same things for a long time. It’s only once the mob actually showed up that they banned him. If the ayatollah was saying “go here and destroy this building” and it got done then they’d ban him based on this precedent

It’s also a funny argument to me because you have people comparing trump to the ayatollah and mao and thinking it helps their case.

While private businesses, homes, and police precincts were burning, many politicians were promoting more rioting and reminding us that "rioting is the voice of the unheard."

Creating accounts for political flamewar isn't ok here. Please stop creating accounts to break the site guidelines with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> They still let the Ayatollah Tweet.

Presumably, while Don, Jr. did the same thing when making the same complaint, you mean “Iran’s Supreme Leader”, which is a unique position. There are a large number of Ayatollahs (and even several Grand Ayatollahs, including Supreme Leader Khamenei).

I have come to this realization recently as well. "Deplatforming" people of significant real-world power, or largely any world leader, is notably different than deplatforming an average person. A lot of comments I feel are conflating the effects of banning an average person, or an average person trying to become more well-known ("candidate Trump"), with an established world leader.

People with power have real consequences on the life of each individual. I admit I don't know how to treat those two groups but I don't think the arguments used for the average person are the same arguments that should be applied to world leaders, and vice versa.

Actually, deplatforming a world leader has less power. He could call a press conference and say whatever he wants at any time. He could order his staff to setup a 24x7 conference call and just literally pick up a phone and rant about anything he wants at any time, and have millions of people listening.

Except Trump can't call a press conference; not really. He hasn't been able to stand up to sustained real press questioning for years. That's why there have been essentially zero real press conferences at the White House lately.

Responsible news networks would refuse to relay seditious talk. Would be constrained to his media bubble.

It does have a moderating effect in a literal sense: it takes more than a few seconds to arrange a press conference.

That was what I meant to imply, although my comment did not come across that way. Deplatforming a world leader affects that individual less than an average user.

Don't forget GA - Dems won full control, and will now have at least some ability to legislate. So Twitter et al need to be thinking about how to get ahead of the complaints that the left has against section 230 (the left hates it because they are not forced to aggressively moderate, the right hates it because they are allowed to moderate at all). This was not looking likely to be something they had to worry about until the surprise sweep in Georgia, so I'd argue that may have played as big a role as the craziness in DC.

I had forgotten about 230. Banning Trump makes a lot more sense with that in context.

I haven't heard anybody anywhere near the left criticizing Section 230. Not sure where you heard that.

Joe Biden has called for 230 to be revoked immediately. I would think that counts.

It would, if Joe Biden were anywhere near the left.

But he's not. He's a Bush Sr.-era Republican wearing a (D) at the end of his name.

Have you ever heard Kara Swisher go off on this? She's vicious on the topic.

The latter I think is being underrated as a major contributing factor.. fear of retribution and all that.

AND the evidence this movement is organizing more violence around the inauguration.

With this knowledge, Twitter would be complicit if they continued to enable and amplify it.

Should there be a distinction when the bad things aren't said on Twitter itself? Ignoring the argument that what happened in DC was the culmination of Trump's incitement throughout his presidency, his order to his supporters to march to the Capitol, and claiming he would be marching with them, was _the_ direct call to action. It was given during his in-person speech in DC. Why should Twitter ban him for that?

I think he was banned because Democrats took control of power and FAANG is telegraphing their compliance to those now in charge of how they're going to be regulated. They're going to over-correct, as they're starting to do with banning Michael Flynn and more will follow.

Anyone on YouTube or Twitter that doesn't outright refer to the people who broke into the Capitol as terrorists or insurrectionists are getting demonitized/banned -- literally forced groupthink influenced by who is allowed to monetize their videos. People on the left are trying to extend the culpability of those who broke the law to those who voted for Trump. Implying nearly 70 million people are themselves insurrectionists. I don't think this will be good for the Internet the next time the GOP gets enough seats to pass legislation. I'd be happy knowing that's the worst of what's to come.

> Mob actually materializes and several people die - Twitter sure they now have to take him literally

Angry groups of protesters and resulting deaths are not a thing that started happening this week. Twitter are pathetic and have taken a stand once the writing was on the wall.

Yeah their hesitation shouldn't have happened. They shouldn't have issued those weird corrections to his statements either, they would have had MORE credibility had they come down sooner by actually assigning someone to give the public legitimate reasons for them to ban him.

You’re missing the point. If Twitter had a spine and was actually acting in good faith in accordance with their rules they would have issued a ban years ago. They would have done a lot of other things too so this is purely a hypothetical. They waited until after confirmation of the election and strong evidence that the powers that be are now firmly on their side before lifting a finger.

I’m not defending race rioting. But the context of the riots that occurred over race and the riot that occurred where a mob was two doorways away from killing members of congress is contextually important, as is the fact that the capital rioters answered to exactly one (1) person. And the fact that that one person who had the power to call in the national guard to prevent such deaths appeared uninterested in doing so.

I've not seen a source for this claim

Black Lives Matter is still allowed on Twitter. Dozens of people have died from their protests and riots, not to mention hundreds of businesses vandalized, looted, and set afire. Ditto Antifa. This ban is utterly political, which, depending on how "libertarian" you are, may be fine. But the precedent is not a good one in my opinion.

Who has died? Can you name names?

19+ people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...

I think that list is only Minneapolis. There are more.

How about David Dorn, retired St Louis Police Captain.

The suspects have been caught and charged. Dorn was not a Trump supporter and wasn't killed for political reasons. Debra White told the paper that her father opposed much of Drumpf's rhetoric and policies, including "the things he said about Colin Kaepernick, the kids locked up in cages, the racist remarks." Dorn's daughters stated their father did not want to support the "law and order agenda".

Jessica Doty-Whitaker shot for saying all lives matter.

This is a very strange case. But nevertheless it can't be said if she was killed for that. And the incident was not part of any kind of protest or riot.

"Ramirez said in the Fox59 interview the two groups separated because they realized people in each group were armed. He said both groups then fist-bumped and went their separate ways. But someone opened fire from a nearby bridge and struck Doty-Whitaker, Ramirez said. He said the shooters then ran away. Ramirez said he fired back but did not hit anyone. When contacted by IndyStar, members of Doty-Whitaker's family declined interview requests."

Police later released the video. She was shot just moments after yelling out “All lives matter”.

https://www.wthr.com/article/news/crime/police-release-video...

Considering the sheer number of protests and protesters involved, BLM protests were mostly peaceful.

https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...

"While the summer of 2020 experienced 100 days of violence and destruction in cities, according to the the U.S Department of Homeland Security, the most recent CCC study of 7,305 separate events in May and June suggests that 96.3% of events involved no property damage or police injuries and 97.7% of events had no injuries reported. Pressman spoke with UConn Today about the new report."

In contrast, the attack on the capital building was a deliberately violent attack on the seat of our national government. Rioters brought zip ties to potentially hold lawmakers hostage, blunt force weapons, and firearms. It was inherently a violent undertaking with revolutionary aims.

It usually only takes one to change public perception. And DC was a sample of one. OTOH, BLM has media covering for them(1) to make the group look peaceful.

1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cnn+fiery+but+mostly+peaceful&iax=...

And that was a small fraction of the people who were there to protest, so they were mostly peaceful as well.

Certainly most of the large BLM protests ended in destruction and violence, at least in my state of Minnesota. There’s a reason the national guard had to be deployed. People find strength in numbers.

I like how you respond to a thoughtful post with statistical data with your own conjecture.

That statistical data is pretty bunk. What constitutes an 'event?' It seems that they cast a pretty broad net if they came up with thousands of them. There was a protest in my town with all of 30 people in attendance - does that count? For several nights in a row I tuned in to the news in my state to watch straight up riots in Minneapolis.

It's clear from the pictures of what happened in the capitol that it was done by a tiny fraction of people from the protests, so you don't need any statistical analysis for that.

People brought firearms to BLM events, too. Whether they brought them before or after riots broke out is unknowable. I support BLM and not rioters, fwiw.

What makes this unique is that there are records online of people planning violence in advance.

> Considering the sheer number of protests and protesters involved, BLM protests were mostly peaceful.

This is a pretty terrible standard, since MAGA rallies are mostly peaceful as well. The issue is what do we do with the ones that aren't, not how many of them are.

I think the comparison was BLM protests to this “protest”, not all MAGA rally’s.

which is sort of silly. the source cited higher up is counting how many separate BLM events involved police injuries and/or property damage. how does it make sense to compare that figure to a single event? with a sample of one, it can only be 100% or 0% by that methodology.

But this wasn't a rally. This was literally them storming the halls of Congress to take back their country from what they believe are corrupt communist deep state agents. Why do they believe that? Because their leader Trump has been amplifying this type of conspiratorial misinformation on Twitter for the past 4 years

The “the percent of protests that are peaceful” largely depends on what you decide to include in that category.

Suppose the peaceful portion of BLM protests didn’t happen, would the violent riots go from being justified to unjust? Why would the presence of the peaceful protests change our moral assessment of the violent ones? Same with the MAGA demonstrations. It should not matter that there were numerous other peaceful MAGA rallies when assessing the storming on the capital.

If you murder every 100th day, are you 99% peaceful?

99% of days you are.

100% agree, these social media companies with their fake empathy and double standards are not fooling anyone.

Person says SARS-Cov-2 is no big deal or cured with quackmeal, causes deaths, not de-platformed.

I think it's a calculated risk knowing that Biden's win was actually certified so there's now no way this can come back and bite them. I am sure in an alternate universe @PresidentForLife would have been able to tweet indefinitely.

Twitter wants no skin in the game.

A left-wing aligned media business has just taken a serious political action against the sitting president. They didn't even wait for the dust to settle and Trump to leave office. Twitter has not had time to link tweets in the internet world to actions in the real world; there is normally a settling after this sort of event where it turns out that what actually happened was different to the first two weeks of media reporting. When everyone calms down a month after the crisis, this will be looked back on as opening a can of worms that was a horrible mistake.

This protest in the Capitol is a right-wing escalation of a sustained left-wing effort to paint the 2016 election as illegitimate. The US is in trouble if this new thinking takes hold and businesses start exercising their right to discriminate politically. The country will be inoperable.

Donald Trump was the one saying the 2016 election had massive voter fraud. He was saying it before, after, and during that election. His words in 2016 and 2017 we're much worse in spreading distrust in the electoral system than any democrat since the Civil War. [0]

https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/27/politics/donald-trump-voter-f...

> sustained left-wing effort to paint the 2016 election as illegitimate

That is such a purposely flawed statement that it is effectively a pure lie even if some of those beats are somewhat true.

Trump has been claiming election fraud since 2016. He claimed he got more votes than Clinton and that three million people voted illegally in California which is why he lost the popular vote.

The only things claimed illegitimate by anyone with any power in the left were either "it isn't fair that the popular vote doesn't matter", "we shouldn't disenfranchise voters as the GOP keeps trying to do in the name of 'election security'" or "certain actors illegally acted around the 2016 election".

There is a world of difference between that last one (the closest to illegitimate) and an actual claim of fraud.

Look, I'm sure it is about to become an over-repeated political talking point, but there is a @SpeakerPelosi tweet on the record where she says in May 2017.

"Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts." [0]

Now I'm sure that is an out of context tweet and she probably didn't literally mean "Our elections [were] hijacked", but that would get Trump booted from Twitter.

It isn't a serious argument to say that Trump is bad because his opponents can deduce he means to do secret evil so it is OK to out-of-context quote him or purposefully choose the least charitable interpretation but Pelosi can say that and get the opposite treatment. The current situation is not that unusual for losers of a US presidential elections.

[0] https://twitter.com/speakerpelosi/status/864522009048494080?...

Our election was interfered with my a foreign country. That is not at all the same thing as widespread fraud.

> but that would get Trump booted from Twitter

Trump has called for and praised violence for five years now. He only got banned after fanning the flames during an invasion of the capitol building. (He literally says stay peaceful but not even anything resembling leave until much later in the day)

> It isn't a serious argument to say that Trump is bad because his opponents can deduce he means to do secret evil so it is OK to out-of-context quote him

You don't have to out-of-context quote him.

"We love you. You are all special" while talking directly to those who have invaded the Capitol. That isn't out of context at all. It is exactly what he said and there is no alternative interpretation.

> Pelosi can say that and get the opposite treatment

Do I need to link all of the times where Trump repeatedly said he only lost the popular vote because of fraud. It wasn't a vague statement but a direct one that was repeatedly stated.

> The current situation is not that unusual for losers of a US presidential elections.

No president has waited more than a day to conceded in the modern era. Unless you count Florida where there was odd things going on. Even then it was over once the Supreme Court ruled on it.

Clinton was called out for not conceding the night of the election even though she did first thing in the morning.

These actions are not normal. And I am not even talking about yesterday. Way before that we were way away from normal.

She's talking about this for example: https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber/russian-interference-in-201...

Are you saying the FBI is faking Russian interference?

Or do you have problems understanding the context of the issue at hand?

You seem to be forgetting the 3.5 year long wall of propaganda we were inundated with claiming that Donald Trump was a Russian puppet and Russia hacked our election. You had prominent, important elected officials accusing those that disagree with that assessment of "carrying water for Putin", " doing the bidding of a dictator", things like that. You had many of the same people calling for unrest in the streets until Donald Trump is removed from office.

If that isn't a sustained effort to paint the 2016 election as illegitimate I don't know what is.

While we are on the topic of multi-year propaganda campaigns, can you help me spell Benghazi?

Trump complained more about Russia than anyone else ever did.

How many people got arrested as part of that bogus investigation again?

IIRC Trump also fired multiple people to get the investigation to end. Literally played the Nixon playbook and it was all fake... Sure.

I'm not saying the election of 2016 was legitimate. I never claimed the investigations and claims were bogus, just that they occurred. I'm responding to a claim that this election is called illegitimate by partisans whereas the previous one was not. Whether either election was legitimate or illegitimate, political opponents of the victors put in great effort to paint them as illegitimate. Both sides are playing this game, and to demonize the one doing it now while forgetting that it has been happening for 4 years already is disingenuous.

The seriously v literally question is fascinating. It was the basis for this recent NY Times article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/trump-capitol-pro...

And that article references the original piece in The Atlantic that, inadvertently, provided the get-out for what the NYT laments:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-m...

So Obama, Biden, Bush, et. al. should be banned too for all the completely unnecessary wars/drone strikes that killed civilians?? Or is killing civilians sometimes accepted?

This move is entirely political, Twitter should just man up and accept it, instead of insulting our intelligence.

Trump was not banned for his wars/drone strikes that killed civilians (which he increased, BTW: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/trump-afghanistan-middle-... ).

He was banned for inciting violence using Twitter's platform.

I suppose if Trump ordered unlawful drone killings using Twitter, they also may have banned him for that, but Trump used Twitter to control mobs, not drones.

I will take that link at face value, so Trump is just as bad as Obama? Great, they're both loathsome in my book. Count me in. :)

>He was banned for inciting violence using Twitter's platform.

He supposedly incited people with his rally speech. Besides, I don't think the mob was checking Trumps twitter feed for instructions. The violence seemed premeditated to me.

> When all these people were talking about their contingencies, it was always if and when Trump tells us to. The overriding message I was seeing was, "We're here to do a job, we don't know what that job is yet. When Trump said we're going to go to the Capitol, I guess our job is to go to the Capitol." But then they didn't get any further instructions, so there was a moment of, "Okay, now what? Surely this isn't why Trump called us to DC, we don't get it. This was where he was supposed to unveil the evidence, or arrest the plotters, or reveal that China is behind it." And then none of this happened.

https://www.gq.com/story/man-predicted-capitol-coup-intervie...

> Person says bad things to whip up a mob - Twitter unsure to take him seriously or literally.

> Mob actually materializes and several people die - Twitter sure they now have to take him literally

By this logic do we not also have to delete the account of everyone prominent who tweeted anything to the effect of "no justice no peace" with respect to BLM, given that several people died there as well?

In this case you had people with flags bearing a specific person’s name on them. Certainly muting the only person bearing that name will have a direct effect.

The direct effect being that the bulk of the people on the other side of the isle lose the last shred of respect for these institutions, and switch to or create other sites, causing each side to become part of a permanent echo chamber with a mutually irreconcilable set of accepted facts that cause members of the different groups to come into violent disagreement whenever they encounter one another in physical reality.

I thought the goal was supposed to be to do something that reduced the probability of violent conflict?

You’re underestimating the value of immediate, global, and easily accessible coordination. Trump can try to build his own Twitter but it’s nowhere near the trivial proposition you’re making it out to be. Without this coordination mechanism the mob becomes headless and decentralized.

The hardest part about creating your own Twitter is convincing enough people to switch at once to create a critical mass. Transferring the sitting President of the United States and several other prominent members of his party at the same time in a very public way is exactly how you induce that to happen.

That Parler thing was temporarily offline under the load of all the new users. That's not the problem you have when you're having the actual problem of convincing enough people to switch.

That’s one thing that’s hard about it. Scaling and running the service reliably is far from trivial and this tends to be severely underestimated by “let’s just build a competitor” crowd.

https://parler.com/

Didn't everyone move to Parler?

that aged like fine milk

> Scaling and running the service reliably is far from trivial and this tends to be severely underestimated by “let’s just build a competitor” crowd.

This is not a trivial problem, but it's also not one that hasn't been solved a hundred times before, and seems to be something they've already handled.

But I also want to put something in juxtaposition here. You have on the one hand the argument that this isn't censorship because they're a private company and you can just make your own. On the other hand, the argument that booting them off is useful because making your own is impractical and they'll fail. If one is true then the other isn't, right?

These two situations couldn’t be more vastly different.

The rally was organized by Trump, the mob that marched on the capital was there for Trump, marching with flags for Trump, encouraged and incited by Trump, and aimed at overthrowing a legitimate election in favor of Trump.

BLM was marching for lost lives that could no longer speak for themselves, organized by and for no single individual, carrying flags to honor the fallen, aimed at creating a future where less people would die unnecessarily at the hands of law enforcement.

The primary difference I'm seeing is that one group was there to protest something you don't agree with.

Did you actually read the Twitter blog post explaining the ban? They claim Trump Tweeting that he will not attend the Biden inauguration is “an incitement to violence”. That’s delusional.

Yep, as ‘delusional’ as all the warnings from people who said Trump and his group of psychopaths were going to end up causing a violent attack on democracy... that clearly was an overblown concern, right?

Now I get it, they’re trying to equate the Capitol Hill thing to a revolution. That’s funny, let’s see how far that gets. My bet’s on it falling flat in a few weeks like everything else.

You mean the violent attackers of democracy who stayed inside the velvet ropes and took selfies? https://youtu.be/y9WPuA6EUaw Seems like there is a comically biased double standard when describing protests and riots.

You keep pouring gasoline on a fire and then keep complaining that it won’t go out. You think impeaching him again and banning him on multiple platforms is going to de-escalate the situation? You know it will do the exact opposite. The Democrats and media companies want to poke and poke and poke until they provoke a reaction. You're delusional if you think you can keep insulting the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump without destabilizing the country. But your brains are so broken by Trump that you can't help yourselves and you're destroying the country because of it. I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, but I understand the rage Trump supporters are probably feeling. And I know who is primarily responsible: it's the same contemptuous out of touch elites that gave us Trump in the first place.

Some of the protest videos show peaceful conduct like this one. Others are extremely unpleasant to watch (NSFL).

I have no doubt that if some of the more radical elements in the crowd had actually gotten hold of someone, things would have gotten a lot more serious.

Fortunately that didn't happen, so thank goodness for that.

Except for - you know - the Capitol Police officer that got killed. Other than that, a perfectly peaceful protest.

A grand total of 5 deaths I believe. For what it was, that's probably just about the best possible outcome you can hope for. (Small consolation.)

If they had gotten hold of anyone (especially Pence), the violence might have spiraled completely out of control.

It was a really dangerous situation.

Nice that you chose to focus on that and not on the police officer that got killed or the video of another police officer that for almost crushed to death while being repeatedly punched in the face.

One would be forgiven for thinking you are a dishonest hack.

It reads like left wing conspiracy theories, it’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

This was happening during BLM endlessly last summer. Verified profiles calling for this kind of action, saying looting is part of the struggle and the right thing to do, etc, etc.

Weirdly Twitter didn't seem to wake up when that was happening.

looting isn't the same as storming the capitol.

but still falls under Twitter's "Glorification of Violence policy"

Looting is stealing. Is stealing violence?

It is when you break windows or otherwise damage property to enable the theft.

More than speech is.

Yes, and people were violently killed.

Looting is stealing the same way that storming the capitol is trespassing.

instead of ordering from Amazon or UberEats all the time, why don't you go speak to an owner of a store downtown and say this to them.

It's disgusting the absolute privileged bubble so many on HN live in.

I live in Portland OR a few blocks from where there was a months long siege against federal and police buildings. Yes there was millions of dollars worth of damage done here by looting but thats barely scratching the surface of what happened. The siege of the federal courthouse and central police station involved crazy violent actions on a daily basis, but there was no national outcry to dox and arrest the people responsible for that. People (not "nazis", some not republican/conservative) within blocks of my home have been murdered, beaten, businesses shot up (like the black owned sandwich shop across the street from my apartment because the owner "supported the police") yet there was no deplatforming for the leftist extremists responsible for this. I speak from what I saw right in front of me, what I heard from my living room and bedroom day after day for months, I'm sure there are similar stories from all over the country. Maybe I'm biased by personal experience but it just seems like if angry white kids smash stuff up and say shout some leftist slogans while they're doing it they get a pass but if the angry white kids shout "Trump 2020, something something" while they're doing the same stuff suddenly its sedition and terrorism.

You have got to be kidding. It’s not “suddenly” sedition and terrorism. People went into the Capitol with the stated goal of overturning an election, effectively overthrowing the government. That is sedition!

Seriously, I sympathize with what you’ve gone through. I’m not trying to minimize the damage that was done in downtown Portland, but it’s not even close to the same thing.

Overturning an election is not effectively overthrowing the government, and it's certainly not sedition.

I also think most people who entered the Capitol building did so because they were just following the people in front of them; not conciously entering to voice their oppinions to the Senate and House.

> not conciously entering

People traveled from out of state. There was little that wasn’t deliberate about this.

Not from the US, but when the current president of any nation whips up a crowd of fanatic followers at the end of his term to stay in power against the will of the people that is a coup.

What the reasons are for the individual follower is completely and utterly irrelevant, because it is overshadowed by the fact that the current head of the executive tried to overturn the result of an election.

And quite frankly: the only ingredient missing here was support of the military — if he had that the US very likely could have become a dictatorship right now.

> the US very likely could have become a dictatorship right now

Let's see again eight years from now :-(

If violently installing someone to power who wasn’t legitimately elected isn’t overthrowing the government in your mind, I have to wonder what qualifies.

The entire premise of the rally was “stop the steal”. Clearly they weren’t all extremely coordinated, but to varying degrees, the people who stormed the Capitol did so with the stated goal of overturning the election. That they were inept of that they failed isn’t evidence to the contrary.

https://mobile.twitter.com/59dallas/status/13469631997788282...

Fine people on both sides!

I’m pretty sure those rioters were also chanting about overthrowing the government, calling it illegitimate, burning the flag, setting up independent zones trying to secede from the country, literally attacking the seats of power in their local districts and states. The Trump protestors went for a bigger target but their actions were tame in comparison to months of riots, arson, assault and murders.

Most stayed in velvet ropes and took selfies: https://youtu.be/y9WPuA6EUaw

So the people trying to break into the chambers were just going to have a nice talk?

I’m not sure how that video proves anything about “most” people’s intent.

I think it was a very concerning and unpredictable situation, but describing this group as "violent rioters" while describing the riots over the summer as "mostly peaceful protests" is farcical gaslighting. The potential consequences were more grave here, but the actual conduct itself seems much more orderly.

But I agree that as the Democrats and social media companies still continue to poke and poke and poke already angry people that the consequences can get worse. I wish someone reasonable would try to de-escalate the situation instead of continuing to add gasoline to the fire with further suppression, insults, and contempt for Trump and his supporters--but Silcion Vally and Democratic leadership can't seem to help themselves and would prefer to further insult and alienate the 74 million people who voted for Trump just 2 months ago.

This is going to end badly.

This is my conclusion as well. The standards we hold must hold for everyone.

But it is becoming hard to deny that the standards seem very conditional on whether you agree with the motives and end goal of the people committing violence or not.

I think what happened in the capitol was horrible and hope enough people get to face the consequences in court. Similarly what has happened in Portland and other cities throughout this year has been horrible, from what I can gather and your statement.

Yet events are covered completely differently.

> The standards we hold must hold for everyone.

I don't think that is the standard at all. Those who represent the voice of others are held to a greater standard.

Plenty of every day citizens can cheat on their significant other and aren't going to lose their job because of it. Any scandal can destroy an individual's career when in a position of authority, judges, chiefs, politicians, etc.

Plenty of every day citizens can go on vacation during the pandemic and be fine. Politicians who do this will have their position revoked (look to Canada for easy examples recently).

There is and always should be a double standard for those who represent the voice of many vs the single individual.

Didn’t thousands of people get arrested for BLM though? 15 people have been arrested for Capitol Hill.

> “Trump 2020, something something”

People can vote for and support Trump and have their opinions, even if they are unpopular. But Capitol Hill is a sacred place and people did breach it. Many of which had neo nazi insignia on their clothes. If this isn’t an act of extremism, then what is?

Guess fighting racism gets a pass in a way that overthrowing democracy doesn't.

On top of that one is the reaction to real, both ongoing and centuries old injustices and the other is quite frankly an attempted coup. Protesting that the other guy won is one thing. Storming the capitol to force your guy in while the votes are counted is a completely different thing.

If you are telling yourself otherwise you might wanna do a reality check. E.g. imagine the whole thing in flipped roles (if you have enough fantasy). Republicans would be completely outraged over all the actions they did in the past 4 years if it was the other team who did them.

I am not from the US and think the whole two party thing is silly anyways, but the shere cognitive distortion going on there hurts. Quite frankly it is below any HN user to uncritically wave a team flag that way, especially when it means you become blind to reality by doing so.

The US Dems would be a center-right party in most european nations and last time I checked we weren't the unfree ("socialist!") doomscape Republicans like to paint it as. In fact I'd rather live under the EU/German laws than under whatever the US system has become and I am not a nationalist by any stretch (I am not even German). Our system just leads to calmer streets, friendlier faces, less fear and stress overall (except for the tax system, I could really strangle the people who came up with that — not for the amount of taxes, but for the complexity of the system).

If presented with lies and reality, choose reality and try to correct for your own biases. Thats what good people do.

Looting is reasonably acceptable especially in light of genuine BLM grievances with police brutality. This was storming of the capitol with highly malicious intent (pipebombs, zipties, guns) based on utter lies. You’re arguing in bad faith.

I am absolutely not. Looting does nothing to the Police or the authorities and everything to businesses including those who are barely keeping going after the lockdowns.

Twitter gave a platform to those who had taken over six blocks of a city (CHAZ) without a single ban.

Twitter consistently allows all out racism towards white and asian people from verified profiles without a single ban.

Twitter allows the organization of mobs for the left without a single ban.

I think you are arguing in bad faith.

I disagree, Trump is a fascist and all fascists are criminals. Starving fascism of air is the best way to keep it in check. In most cases racial justice gets a pass especially if it’s a properly warranted as in the US. All this right wing whataboutism to justify a racist and a fascist. You should be ashamed.

Do you say the same when someone says all white people are racists on Twitter? Should we starve them of Oxygen too? Are you reporting those tweets?

Ah, yes. Looting and disrupting the process of democracy seems on the same level. No? Oh.

Does Twitter have enough resources to police all verified profiles? It would seem to me Twitter has an App Store problem when it comes to inconsistent enforcement of rules?

Racist justice always gets a pass when compared to fascist nonsense based on lies. For the sheer scale of the BLM protests they were overwhelmingly peaceful.

He also tweeted praise for the insurrectionist and justifications for the insurrection during the attack.

Any idea that he hadn’t realized the effect his words would have and had learned his lesson go firmly out the window.

(If there were any remaining doubts before that... did anyone believe he didn’t know what he was doing?)

The tweet that got him banned literally said go home in love and peace. The perception of him as an adversary and that everything he says has some hidden meaning is the only thing getting him banned by tech companies. This entire blog is trying to out words in his mouth as well.

What bad thing did he say to incite the mob?

Of course, it’s unreasonable to act upon what someone did X years ago.

Sarcasm doesn’t work too well in a text medium, but if taken at face value Simon Wiesenthal would disagree with you

Sure. He's violated twitter's rules numerous times. This is as good of a time as any to actually enforce their rules.

Twitter rules are so broad and states so vaguely, that half of the Twitter users technically violated them numerous time, and Twitter applies these rules selectively.

You are being incredibly naive to think that the people in question are capable of changing their minds on this particular topic at this particular time.

I know Trump supporters, and even they (the ones I know) don't justify his tweets. If Twitter had used numerous previous tweets, I could personally go and argue with those supporters and feel like I was making headway.

I don't argue with them to change their mind, I argue with them for the crowd of 5-6 people listening who are on the fence. All of them were just pushed off that fence.

> All of them were just pushed off that fence.

If they were pushed off the fence by this, they would have never landed on the other side of the fence in any case.

A bit of a grim point, but the timing is also right in that the majority of staff are currently WFH, removing much of the potential for any violent protest/retaliation at their offices. Maybe being naive but I wonder how much this has been a consideration in the past.

I mean, they were going to ban him on January 20, 2021 at 12pm no matter what. The last few days just escalated the timeframe.

>It's strange that they picked such a poor way to justify the ban when they could have made a significantly stronger case, and in doing so could have convinced millions more people that they are trying their best to apply policies evenly.

It's clear that people are trying to make this into a cultural moment where you either distance from / renounce Trump (which is almost costless given the immanency of his term's end) or you're treated as an unrepentant enemy of civil society. We're seeing pro-Trump hubs being systematically purged in various ways from a variety of platforms right now, and the symbolic value of moves like this is what's paramount.

It may be that there is in fact a line that you can cross where the general public becomes significantly less apathetic.

imminent != immanent

>As such, our determination is that the two Tweets above are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.

I made a comment before to the effect, what happens when you are banned permanently from the biggest social media platforms currently in existence?

Will these bans carry over and will they start to affect any who oppose the bans or simply parrot what he says elsewhere?

Will these spawn new social media sites or will they damage existing ones or do both? This is all so fascinating and frightening at the same time. People may want to claim there is no government interference but these sites have for many years recently reacted to the threat of it which in turn effectively is what is happening now.

I am just find this all so bizarre but I think these sites figure they can act now simply because in a short time he will not be in his position of power and lose the bully pulpit which he can use without them

Trump will take up shop on Parler and be welcomed with open arms.

Parler is dead, aka banned by apple and google 1-2 hours ago.

Not yet... so far he's gotten slapped for using @POTUS and @TeamTrump. Is this the "bargaining" phase of grief?

In other words:

Never let a good crises go to waste.

Calling terrorists patriots sounds like a stellar reason to ban him. This is prime, low on content, high on wall-of-text rationalization.

“Wall of text rationalization”

That’s a great term. They write dozens of inaccurate statements stitched together with their own emotional baggage. What’s the result?

You have no idea where to attack/address/start because their entire wall of text is riddled with false assumptions and straight misinformation.

Never seen one Trump supporter have clear, cogent thoughts.

>I think it will have some negative 2nd/3rd order effects. that they haven't yet realized.

This is correct. The type of person that stormed the capitol will perceive this as an escalation. I’m sure that’s not what we need, but I’m also sure that there is no good way out of this mess.

The people that stormed the capital have been pretty clear about their position here: they plan to continue escalating unless Trump is installed into power for a second term. There's nothing we can do to meet people who think like that halfway; the only course of action which might avert further tragedies is to convince them that they aren't very powerful and won't be able to achieve their goals.

If you see their radicalization as the problem instead of a symptom you’re missing the plot.

I see it as a symptom, but the underlying problems are complex and can't be resolved over the next 2 weeks. So we need a stopgap solution to prevent the violent attack many of them have promised for the Inauguration.

the stopgap was the supreme court and they've chosen to be derelict in their duties. these people just want their case to be heard. in absence of doing so, the narrative around the election is being entirely defined to them by lin wood. this situation is a chinese fingertrap, force will only make it worse.

The people you're hearing this from just aren't being honest with you. Their case was heard dozens of times in courts across all the disputed states. The idea that the Supreme Court specifically needs to weigh in was created only after those losses, as a deliberately impossible standard to keep people mad; everyone familiar with the legal system was saying from the start that the Supreme Court wouldn't rule on the merits of this case.

Well, I'll just be over here renegotiating the Treaty of Versailles to deal with those underlying causes. France can wait...

Severe enough "symptoms" can turn into comorbidities and are diseases unto themselves. Sometimes worse that the initial disease. If you get a rash from poison ivy, itching is a symptom. If you scratch all your flesh off because it itches and you're a stubborn idiot that won't go get treatment from a doctor, and then that exposed flesh gets a nasty infection that eats your limb, well then the symptom has now advanced into a disease worse than the initial cause.

Let's say in this metaphor the doctor stands for maybe seeking therapy for paranoia and oppositional defiant disorder, or something like that. These people are not without agency in their own radicalization, though we could argue that society really doesn't help matters when it comes to mental health or pernicious algorithms that send people down conspiracy holes.

Was a survey performed as people were entering the grounds?

Also, how does one learn how to see the future with such certainty? It's like there was a sale on crystal balls and everyone but me got one. :(

There was a survey! Many news reporters were on site, interviewing people who entered the grounds. They talked about how they were taking the government back, how they'd like to get their hands on Congressional leaders, and how they'd be back with rifles on January 20th if Congress didn't do the right thing. Without random sampling, there's no easy way to know if it was 20% or 80% of the insurrectionaries thinking that way, but even 20% of such a big crowd leaves enough people to do some serious damage 2 weeks from now.

In fairness. The news interviews a lot of people and picks the best quote.

Remember they are selling you a story and need you to watch.

Is there any specific reason to believe the media accounts are false, or just a general principle? I feel like this is starting to approach the level of skepticism where it's impossible to be convinced of anything.

Who said they were false? Click bait is rarely false just misleading.

My local news runs a promo every night that they have some super important message that you need to hear "what you could be doing wrong with kids". When they finally share it's something like 'yoga is good for your health'.

Journalism is a business. All news orgs are judged by selling papers to driving clicks.

Seeing a few people saying something means a few people said something. Assuming it applies to all and skepticism sets in.

Some people may follow through with that, or they may not.

The media tells stories, social media tells stories, our friends and family tell stories, and our own mind tells stories. But they are just stories. Some of them will surely come true, some of them will not.

It feels like you know, just as it feels to the people at this riot like they know - it is the very same underlying phenomenon: human consciousness, with its ability to see into the future, to read the minds of millions of people, to know the fine details of what happened at an event even though no one who was actually there may have witnessed it with clarity. It is the most powerful device on the planet, but if it isn't kept under control: watch out (as we saw at the Capitol).

>Was a survey performed as people were entering the grounds?

No. But an inventory of some of those who left the grounds in handcuffs was performed. And various types of weapons, police-style zip ties and molotov cocktails were found.

Dozens were injured, five people are dead, one of them beaten to death.

Offices were trashed, items stolen and the seat of our government was vandalized.

You don't need a crystal ball to draw conclusions from that.

You need a crystal ball to draw correct conclusions about the future though. What's happening in threads like this is that people have completely lost control of their minds. I estimate that 90%+ of comments are people mistaking their imagination for reality - reality is mostly unknown, but you'd never know it from the way people talk.

It's almost as if people have been hypnotized or something. No one has the slightest concern for what is actually true. I hope it's only people on internet forums that are like this.

Do you need a crystal ball to draw such confident conclusions about how other people think? It seems pretty unlikely that everyone who disagrees with you does so because they've lost control of their minds and don't care about the truth.

Then when I mention the notion of the truth, why is it received with hostility, and downvoted, universally?

Here, I'll give you a chance to see if you care about the truth:

SpicyLemonZest says:

> The people that stormed the capital have been pretty clear about their position here: they plan to continue escalating unless Trump is installed into power for a second term.

Can you come up with a plausible explanation for how this can be known?

> There's nothing we can do to meet people who think like that halfway; the only course of action which might avert further tragedies is to convince them that they aren't very powerful and won't be able to achieve their goals.

Can you come up with a plausible explanation for how this can be known?

>You need a crystal ball to draw correct conclusions about the future though.

I don't know about that.

I'll prognosticate that the close compatriots of the violent insurrectionists who are currently enjoying three hots and a cot courtesy of the US Government will almost certainly engage in more violent acts. Probably fairly soon.

History is generally a pretty good guide to the future.

Will every single person who smashed windows, beat on people with pipes and bats and went looking for Congresscritters to take hostage show up at the inauguration with RPGs to kill as many people as they can? I don't know.

I can't say for sure, but since they've already shown themselves to be angry, violent and willing to harm/kill others, it's a pretty good bet that a significant number of those people will attempt violent action against their perceived enemies in the future.

Why is that an unreasonable assumption to make?

>I'll prognosticate that the close compatriots of the violent insurrectionists who are currently enjoying three hots and a cot courtesy of the US Government will almost certainly engage in more violent acts. Probably fairly soon.

I hear most people on the left support reforming criminals, and finding underlying root-causes. Do you?

>I hear most people on the left support reforming criminals, and finding underlying root-causes. Do you?

I do, for root-causes such as poverty, lack of economic opportunity, lack of education, being victims of racist policies, etc... sure, reform is possible.

When the root causes are massive delusion, indulging in ridiculous conspiracy theories, general resentment that other people want to be treated fairly, cult-of-personality-like worship of a dictator, etc. Then unfortunately the root-cause is ignorance and the problem is unfixable.

>When the root causes are massive delusion, indulging in ridiculous conspiracy theories, general resentment that other people want to be treated fairly, cult-of-personality-like worship of a dictator, etc. Then unfortunately the root-cause is ignorance and the problem is unfixable.

And how do you know all this? You're pretty quick at finding root causes.

>I hear most people on the left support reforming criminals, and finding underlying root-causes. Do you?

I didn't realize that whether people can or can't change was a political, left/right thing.

I'll assume you're asking that question in good faith, just somewhat awkwardly.

It depends on the person and the situation. Wouldn't you agree?

>It depends on the person and the situation. Wouldn't you agree?

Exactly. However people seem reluctant to grant this to Trump supporters. They seem to be always lumped together as evil racists.

>However people seem reluctant to grant this to Trump supporters. They seem to be always lumped together as evil racists.

I find it more than a little ironic that you choose to paint others with a very broad brush while making the claim that those people paint others with a broad brush.

Personally, I try to treat others based on their individual actions. Perhaps you should try it sometime.

EDIT: I mistook you for SpicyLemonZest

> Why is that an unreasonable assumption to make?

Your statements are fairly reasonable, and you have awareness of when you are speculating. If more people were like this, perhaps this tailspin could be averted. But look through threads like this and judge for yourself how many people are as reasonable as you.

> The type of person that stormed the capitol will perceive this as an escalation. I’m sure that’s not what we need, but I’m also sure that there is no good way out of this mess.

I actually think that the reason we are in this mess is because there have been zero consequences for terrible behavior, so far.

Of all the terrible things Trump has done, it has taken inciting a riot, an attempted overthrow of our democratically elected government, for him to loose his megaphone. Why was incarcerating children at the border not enough? Or encouraging those "fine people" in Charlottesville who murdered a woman? Or one of the many other instances of him spewing hate?

We need more accountability. Actions have consequences, and it is long overdue that those people who take irresponsible, harmful actions, either out of desire for personal gain or sheer idiocy, start feeling the consequences.

The right is supposedly the side to which "law and order" appeals. Trump and his people are exactly the kind of people who need to know that they will get punished to the full extent of the law when they misbehave. That's the only thing that will keep them in line.

Because it's not like they have a moral compass to fall back on.

This comment is entirely divorced from reality.

Would you care to be more specific about what you think is factually incorrect about that comment, or are you just glibly trying to borrow a phrase that is more commonly (and more accurately) used these days against Trump and his supporters?

It certainly seems to me that Trump and many of his most high-profile supporters have been remarkably free from serious consequences despite behavior that has been scandalous to an unprecedented degree. Going by the political and societal norms of just a few decades ago, Trump's political career should have been dead and buried dozens of times over.

The "kids in cages" and "very fine people" nonsense continues to get peddled despite not being rooted in reality. And lets not forget, Trump told everyone to drink bleach to treat COVID-19!

You seem to be complaining about some stuff that's not actually mentioned in the comment at issue. That's not a great way to back up that "divorced from reality" assertion. And for the stuff that does appear to be at least somewhat relevant to the comment at issue, you haven't clarified anything about what you believe to be divorced from reality, merely asserted that it is all "nonsense".

The comment at issue did not use the phrase "kids in cages". That's you adding your personal color to a subject that you seem to object to being brought up in any manner at all. It looks like you're trying to build a straw-man or three, rather than justify the accusation that the comment in question is "entirely divorced from reality".

"Or encouraging those "fine people" in Charlottesville who murdered a woman" is divorced from reality, because it didn't happen

More specifically, it gets the order of events wrong. Trump's comments about "very fine people" came after the deadly white supremacist rally, so it's misleading to imply that those comments were in encouragement of the killing.

However, it's perfectly valid to construe Trump's comments as praise after the fact for the white supremacist rally, even though he specifically condemned the killing that resulted. Because Trump's assertions that there were "very fine people" on both sides and that there were many people on the alt-right side of that event who were not neo-Nazis or white nationalists are simply not credible claims. Trump was praising somebody. Even praising or encouraging the kind of white supremacists who don't get violent is abhorrent conduct on the part of the president, but the comment upthread exaggerated beyond this.

"And you had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally"

Right. Trump said that, but that doesn't actually change the fact that that there was no reason for anybody to be showing up to support the alt-right side of that event unless they were in fact a neo-Nazi or white nationalist. Pretending that there was a significant faction of those torch wielders who somehow weren't white supremacists is just silly. But Trump definitely didn't intend to praise the empty set with his "very fine people" comment.

I think the person who was blocked on twitter will perceive this as an escalation too.

They should have just shadowbanned him.

Probably not going to work for someone with millions of followers and thousands of likes and replies on every tweet.

> The type of person that stormed the capitol will perceive this as an escalation.

One can argue that this type of person would potentially perceive any action (or inaction) as an escalation. That doesn't mean that action shouldn't be taken.

Indeed, even inaction may be infuriating to these mislead people.

Look at the utterly insane mental gymnastics you're engaging in. "People are angry at constantly being treated with contempt and having their elected representative smeared. Let's impeach him again, call all his supporters terrorists, and ban them from communicating!" People like you and the Democrats seem desperate to cause more violence instead of de-escalating the situation with a peaceful, dignified exit. It's a shame that you care more about "owning Trump" one more time rather than promoting peace, but I'm not surprised.

You've been using HN primarily for political battle, which we ban accounts for, regardless of which politics they're battling. We have to, because doing that destroys the curious conversation HN is supposed to exist for (see [1] for more explanation).

You've also been breaking the site guidelines egregiously and often, such as with personal attacks and name-calling. That's seriously not allowed here.

Therefore I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. The rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

On the one hand it looks bad for the incoming party to immediately replace the palace security and start issuing arrest warrants for opposition leaders, but on the other hand it may need to be done in order to run a government that isn't under physical siege on a regular basis.

The environment has changed.

Previously theoretic risks are now manifest, demonstrated, and cognizable.

Actual riots, insurrection, disruption of government, assaults on law enforcement, damage to government buildings, theft of government property, violence, and deaths, have occurred.

The instigator is unrepentent and non-credible in what are at best tepid disavowals.

The totality of context has changed. If "he has tweeted worse things in the past", the undeniable impact is abundantly clear.

The ban is absolutely warranted. If anything, it is many years too late.

Twitter specifically address these points:

Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks. After assessing the language in these Tweets against our Glorification of Violence policy, we have determined that these Tweets are in violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy and the user @realDonaldTrump should be immediately permanently suspended from the service.

From TFA

I agree with the action and disagree with their justification.

Because of the weakness of their justification, this could be further gasoline on the fire for his 74 million supporters. I frequently find myself having to argue with said supporters, and I can't argue that this justification makes sense other than to say... well they should have banned him before hand.

It feels like they were looking for almost anything remotely shitty that Trump said to ban him. More specifically, they are looking for a reason to ban him based on saying anything not in support of the next administration, because of his supporters storming the capital. I can see the chain of logic here, I just think it's a little weak and being selectively enforced.

Edited: to make more sense hopefully.

His supporters are already on fire.

This is reducing repeat ignition and stilling winds fanning flames.

See Chamberlain on the effectiveness of appeasement.

Calling everyone who voted for Trump a supporter isn’t accurate. I know people who strongly dislike him and voted for him over Biden. As a lower bound you can estimate around 8% of voters will donate to each campaign which clearly marks them as supporters. Perhaps as many as 40% of those 74 million votes come from strong supporters who might not donate but will advocate for him among friends and family etc.

However, mostly it’s based on party affiliation where people voting against him in a primary would vote for him in a general election.

Good point.

To kind of latch onto what you said, I'd say that there is 60% of those 74 million who would have benefited from a Twitter ban which was well justified. They are more on the fence and can be persuaded by the tides of big business and what seems like an over reaction on their part. The 40% are probably hopelessly convinced of anything that Republicans say.

Can casting your one-every-four-years vote for a presidential candidate not be accurately construed as showing support?

"I do not support this man but I did want him to be President, and cast my ballot for him" is a concept I can't understand at least.

There are 3 options vote for A, vote for B, or abstain in one way or another.

When you have such a limited number of options their isn’t an obvious reason for the choice. Both loving A or hating B more than you hate A can result in an A vote. With millions of voters some people are going to vote based on silly crap like a candidates name being similar to someone they know, or a coin flip. Hell, you can expect at least a few mistakes.

PS: 1,865,620 people voted libertarian, presumably a few felt the way you do but when you know someone isn’t getting elected that opens up even more options.

If a person were so concerned about not being a Trump supported, like you mentioned they could have abstained or voted for some other person that's not Trump. At the end, voting for Trump is support for Trump no matter what convoluted logic was used to arrive at that decision.

Tell the trump supporters you know that this is about imminent threat. trump's words just started a historic riot, and it looks like he may say more things that spark unrest in the immediate future. This isn't about both sides or BLM. He just, two days ago, caused insurrection. It would be negligent to just watch him do it again

I’m a Trump supporter who voted for him twice. I condemn what happened in the capital as well as the BLM riots that burned down businesses. I’m okay with both sides being met with gas and rubber bullets. All of trumps supporters aren’t lunatics. I would say the people who stormed the capital are maybe 10% of his support in the type of person who would attack someone over politics.

Trump called for this gathering to happen, and when it got way out of control, and then became an invasion of the capitol, he did absolutely nothing effective to stop it. He watched the whole thing unfold on live TV, with innumerable ways to communicate with that crowd, and he did nothing except tell them “be less violent, and I love you”.

So if you are still a “Trump supporter” at this point, I really don’t see how you can also say you “condemn what happened in the capitol”. Because Trump didn’t.

Hmmm I guess I would be better to say I’m a conservative libertarian who voted for trump twice. I’m happy to see the back of Trump and as his presidency progressed I realized he nor the gop align with my views. I really see how fake both sides are and have become jaded with politics.

I’ve told all of my maga friends Trump is a clown all along. But again the left really didn’t have any issues with riots this summer and now everyone’s clutching their pearls.

Don't you think that one of the most important changes in recent weeks is that he's now a lame duck, he doesn't really have power anymore. This is why he's been losing more an more allies since election day. Powerful figures and institutions can change their stance now and this is a preemption of his exit when the next president takes over.

I'm basically saying, it's a whole lot easier to be "brave" and deal a blow to a lame duck than a live tiger.

> he's now a lame duck, he doesn't really have power anymore

you can try telling that to the 5 dead people from the sacking of the Capitol I guess

The environment has changed, most significantly in that Trump is no longer going to be in control of the DoJ in a few weeks. This isn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back, this is the last straw before the straw dispenser was relieved of power and no one had to accept straw from them anymore.

I think you're right, that this is actually a simple calculus about power and money (as it always has been and always will be). It's really the thing that grinds my gears when I forget myself: The duplicity and virtue signaling. The ad economy having brought back yellow journalism and endless emotional pleas. The internet being used in massive propaganda campaigns and allowing children and non-citizens a voice in forums that people perceive as our civic spaces -- even though they aren't -- because it is actually impossible to "moderate" the massive social media platforms (despite their promises). I like to think that I'm up on classical Stoic philosophy, but I still struggle sometimes to divorce myself from the fervor. It's so human.

My guess is that we are quickly approaching a point in time when culture will start to swing the other way, and the internet will become this thing that people don't take seriously, haha much like it was in the 90s. That, and some combination of that and censorship. And the tech monopolies absolutely will not survive the level of influence they have now, even if they think they are playing it safe by supporting a particular political faction which happens to be popular at the moment. I think things are going to change fairly rapidly in this direction because it turns out being connected constantly is actually pretty awful in most of the ways that count. Thankfully, however, it seems most folks understand this in a kind of unspoken, visceral way. The same sort of "self-policing" feeling you get when you've wasted 12 hours straight playing Skyrim. It just feels dirty.

> And the tech monopolies absolutely will not survive the level of influence they have now, even if they think they are playing it safe by supporting a particular political faction which happens to be popular at the moment.

I hope you’re right but I have my doubts. Currently I see the left waging total war when it comes to censorship and control of allowed/disallowed speech. Their consolidation of power and influence (and their attack on foundations like free speech principles) has been rapid, and pervasive. When I look at the left trying to inject things like the factually incorrect “1619 Project” into schools, I see them trying to make their temporary power gains permanent by propagandizing, so that there is no avenue by which different thought can enter the Overton window.

Maybe I’m being overly cynical but I don’t see a way back from this. I foresee an increasing amount of leftist authoritarianism as the future of the US, because there won’t be a balancing politic on the other side to moderate us.

I agree with you on the surface, but in reading your comment, I'm reminded of feeling exactly the same way after Trump was elected, just in the opposite sense. And thinking about it, this was the same sense I had about things after Obama and even way back with Dubya. The internet really is a communications revolution. I keep saying that we are under assault, our attention spans attrited by the manufacturers of mass media products for clicks (and by our friends and neighbors who are engaging in this kind of feedback loop), and as I mentioned in another comment, it's difficult to separate myself from it and view it objectively. But in talking with you here and others elsewhere, it's clear to me that this is a pervasive issue across time, and I feel strongly that the internet as it exists today and the culture we have as a result simply can't continue. Whether that means that some sort of regulation which turns social media into television controlled by a few select entities, or culture shifting and people lose trust in the information they see online, I can't say, but this level of mass media sensationalism is clearly unsustainable politically. The most powerful political factions have built and maintained their power on the basis of appearing stable to their supporters, and Twitter has (perhaps unknowingly or shortsightedly) sent a message loud and clear to every political faction on the planet. Anybody with real power has every incentive to destroy that kind of political influence. I'd pay a lot of money to watch a documentary on Twitter's reasoning through this decision.

> Actual riots, insurrection, disruption of government, assaults on law enforcement, damage to government buildings, theft of government property, violence, and deaths, have occurred.

This describes the past half-year in Portland, Seattle, and more sporadically in many other cities.

I believe that no accounts on the Left: organizing, not merely advocating - have been permanently shut down.

So, I'm very skeptical that anything legitimate has changed. It feels very political.

This. There are groups like Rose City Antifa in Portland or EDM (Every Day March) in Seattle that regularly engage in widespread violence, disruption, and illegal behavior. They organize and advertise and evangelize their events on all the typical social media platforms. They haven’t been given even a warning, let alone a ban. And yes, people have died due to these groups’ actions.

The difference this time: people died.

This is an uncomfortable suggestion, considering that in 2020, there were mass protests about relevant deaths.

I really wish this would've been the first time that tweets by Donald Trump led to deaths.

Trump's own behavior is the strongest case imaginable, if you're not already convinced he deserves the ban nothing twitter says is going to change that.

This seems like a very "engineer" response to what went on in that it misses the forest for the trees, and I don't mean that in a derogatory way (I often do it myself), just in a matter-of-fact sort of way.

On one hand, I agree with you, the actual content of those tweets is much milder than what he has tweeted before. On the other hand, that absolutely does not matter, at all. 99% of people aren't even going to read the details of what he was banned for. Those who are against him are going to think it was long overdue, and those who love him are going to see it as further evidence of Big Bad Big Tech. But in any case, the actual real, violent assault on the Capitol that was fomented by Trump is the important context of why he was banned - the details of the individual tweets are almost irrelevant.

Using that logic you are banning him because riots happened; Banning him for actions that occurred outside of twitter.

Is the beginning where people get banned from social media for being part of a unwanted group. A case could be made for preventing anyone who has gone to jail from being on the platform in the efforts to cutdown on future crime / increase children safety, etc.

Riots didn't "just happen". They happened because Trump held a rally telling his followers the lie that what was going on in the Capitol was stealing the election from him, and to march on the Capitol. His tweets were part of that message. The fact that those two particular tweets were not the most egregious ones he's ever made is pretty irrelevant.

The biggest reason for the timing IMO is the Senate races in Georgia. Now that Dems are in control of all chambers and Biden's appointments (to FCC and others) can go through, net neutrality is safe and section 230 is no longer in danger of being repealed, so Twitter will not face any consequences for the ban.

> 230 is safe

Both sides have said 230 needs fixed/removed, if for different reasons. to think 230 can't be removed/fixed now is laughable.

https://www.businessinsider.com/obama-section-230-tech-firms...

> President-elect Joe Biden has said that he wants to revoke Section 230. When Biden was vice president under Obama, the administration was largely hands-off when it came to the tech industry.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/17/biden-wants-to-get-rid-of-te...

> Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden told The New York Times editorial board that tech’s legal shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act should be revoked.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/01/04/trump-biden-p...

> Democrats, including President-elect Joe Biden, urged Congress to revise Section 230 to force tech companies to remove hate speech and extremism, election interference and falsehoods. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called Section 230 a gift to Big Tech. "It is not out of the question that that could be removed," she said in 2019.

As an outsider, the situation is quite amusing to see. One side wants to revoke 230 so that the tech companies would stop policing content. Another side wants to revoke it so that the companies would police more content instead.

The Republican position on this has always been idiotic. Revoking 230 would make platforms directly liable for what is written on them, making them crack down more on their posts.

The Republican position isn't so idiotic when you consider that a consequence would be that (supposedly Democrat-supporting) Big Tech companies would be unable to provide platforms for the free spreading of ideas, reducing their attention and revenue, and making it harder for citizens to organize and hold their government to account.

It makes even more sense when you consider that the second-order effect would be that people migrate their discussions to sites operated from countries outside the US, which have their own political agendas. Perhaps you can think of a country that has advanced cyber capabilities, strong control over local platforms, and resentment of US global influence.

This MO of triggering national self-destruction becomes more obvious the more examples you see, such as the spreading of misinformation about 5G or vaccines/masks, in order to radicalize citizens into destroying their own communications infrastructure and overwhelm their health services.

Well, at least in that case things would have to be legally equal right? Twitter would be required to also ban the thousands of Antifa and far-left violent groups that have ravaged cities and local businesses all summer. No more double standards.

While it would be nice if this were the result, why do you imagine that Twitter would ban these accounts promoting violence when members of the American government and major media outlets openly signal boost and support the very same violence? It is clear that one faction's promotion of violence is considered acceptable while the other faction's promotion of violence is not.

While I agree that the woke corps certainly promote and endorse these groups, I still have a small amount of faith in the US legal system to seek justice. Meaning if Twitter failed to maintain their legal obligation to enforce, they'd be open to litigation.

I get the sense the Republican position is often stated in oversimplified terms. Reading some of Trump's comments, it seems like what he's been pushing for isn't so much revoking 230 entirely, but rather mandating that you only get to keep section 230 protections if content moderation is applied "neutrally" (which in his mind means right-leaning content isn't moderated as heavily anymore).

The problem with this, IMHO, in today's polarized world is who judges whether moderation is balanced? Whichever party currently runs the executive branch? A commission whose members are squabbled over like the SCOTUS? Etc. Similar to trying to bring back the FCC "fairness doctrine," it feels unrealistic at best... or a backslide into government censorship at worst.

Would you change your opinion if your life or life of your family member depends on what president says on Twitter?

Can you put yourself into shoes of SOS of Georgia, policeman in DC, senator Lindsey Graham? The mob will tear them apart if they had a chance and mob is advised to do so by Trump. I live in Trump country. A lot of Trump supporters take his calls to action literally.

Should someone's freedom be curbed if it causes harm and death to someone else?

Practically though he will still have ways to reach his base. It'd be okay if they cook in their own soup but problem is that their madness spills over and innocent people get harassed, hurt and now killed. Imagine being on the plane with dozen of Trump supporters and no bodyguard that want to punish you? That's how Mitt Romney felt few days ago. Whose freedom of speech created this situation?

Twitter has probably been given detailed information by the FBI about upcoming attacks being coordinated

> This ban seems to heavily take advantage of the current moment, as it's obvious that he has tweeted worse things in the past.

I don't blame them. Would you rather ban a vindictive US president or an outgoing, lame duck US president in his final days of office? Besides, regardless of how you feel about him, he's one of the main reasons Twitter is still relevant today. If they banned him sooner, they would have lost a ton of traffic.

To be clear, I am not for or against Twitter. I'm just making sense of their rationale.

Negative 2nd / 3rd order effects were inevitable when they made the "newsworthiness" carve-out in the first place.

One rule for the king and one for the commoners isn't a very sustainable policy.

Trump was democratically elected (by commoners). Twitter was built with wealthy private investor money. The fact that Twitter banned many of the commoners who elected Trump, but couldn't ban Trump himself until now due to the fear of public backlash is a testament to how anti-democratic it is to have private control over the national means of communication.

Your right to shout doesn't override my right to not have to listen to you.

And it so happens that most people don't want to listen or give their platform to a sore loser looking to overturn a democratic election by force.

Actually sore loser is a rather generous term. In Europe we call these people fascists.

> Your right to shout doesn't override my right to not have to listen to you.

So don't "follow" him? You know, that thing you do on Twitter to "listen" to people?

Or give you my platform to shout from.

You missed this part.

Twitter is not "your platform". It exists because almost the whole country uses it. Therefore, not just corporate executives, but the whole nation should decide what speech is allowed, and we already have! Speech in privately-owned public spaces like Twitter is governed by the First Amendment to the constitution.

https://jcalebjones.com/2020/10/15/the-first-amendment-and-c...

Twitter is a private company. It's their platform. You use it under their terms. You can't force them to let you use their platform.

> Twitter is a private company.

Twitter is a publicly traded company, they agreed to abide by some restrictions by the government in order to get that status.

None of those restrictions are relevant to the question of who may and may not use their service.

They are relevant to the concept that they give up certain private property rights in order to gain other legal privileges, which is a precedent for requiring that they give up other property rights (such as the right to censor on the basis of politics, etc.).

Property rights are completely irrelevant to the discussion on hand. 'Right to censor' is a made up concept. Companies and individuals have no obligation to publish something they do not agree with. Anti-discrimination laws also do not protect Trump here. He isn't singled out for his race, sex or religion. He's singled out because he incited a seditious mob that overran Congress.

Do believe publicly traded companies are the same as state or federal public entities that serve the public via taxes? I recommend you look up the difference.

I'm aware of the difference, how does that impact the understanding that publicly traded companies have waived certain rights in exchange for certain legal privileges?

>It exists because almost the whole country uses it.

Simply not true. Roughly 1/10th of the US uses twitter actively. [1]

Even if everyone did use it, it's still a private platform owned by a company. Not the government. That means the company gets to run it.

Which is it? Do you want the federal government to stay out of shit, or do you want it to micromanage things? What's your stance on section 230? Without it, they would have been forced to ban Trump years ago.

[1] https://www.omnicoreagency.com/twitter-statistics/

If anywhere near "most people" don't want to listen to Donald Trump, then why was he elected President? So if 51% of Americans don't want to hear about climate change should Twitter ban anyone who brings it up? I don't think so.

Your point is valid and well argued, but I have to highlight that it would be more compelling if Trump had won a majority of the 2016 vote, and if the turnout were closer to 100% (or even if every eligible voter was equally able to cast their ballot).

Let's just say, if you think that 51% of Americans banning discussion of climate change is bad, wait until you imagine about what Twitter's electoral college would ban discussion of.

You need to check the popular vote counts on that election again.

> private control over the national means of communication

Nobody was forcing the president to use twitter to communicate. Now he’ll have to find a different platform.

All these platforms are literally dopamine gerbil wheels enslaving humanity to screens.

Stop pretending these are the progressive vanguards of society.

“Nobody forced you to breath, man. Just grow some gills or something”

Wow Twitter is oxygen now? Dramatic

You're making the billionaire sound like he's a normal guy and everything else is undemocratic.

Who picked any of his family members in top positions? And his election was literally based on attacking the other candidate, not on content.

That's just incredibly obtuse. Obviously "patriot" isn't an epithet but applying to the people you just incited to an armed revolt against our elected government makes this absolute worst thing he's ever said.

>(Also because apparently I have to state this explicitly in every comment related to Trump: I do not support Trump, his supporters, the recent events that occurred at the capitol, etc etc)

The manichaean thinking from both sides is what is really going to doom us in the long term. The other side isn't ever interested in improving the state of the world, they are evil and must be stopped. Even when they say the exact same things you said two weeks ago they are wrong, because it doesn't matter what is said, it matters who said it.

Best of luck to the future octopi civilization that will uncover these servers in the submersed ruins of the US.

could have convinced millions more people that they are trying their best to apply policies evenly

Twitter is never going to convince everyone that they are being fair, and that isn't their goal here. A better way to think of their timing is: "You come at the king, you best not miss."

If Twitter had banned Trump pre-election and Trump had won anyway, the political battle afterwards for the US government to censor social media would have been terrible. Now that Trump is a lame duck and top Republicans have criticized his actions, Twitter is acting from a position of strength.

So, it's certainly taking advantage of the moment. It's a brief period when the Republican party will be unable to strongly push back against banning Trump. If they successfully pull this off, not only will Twitter get rid of an annoyance, they will set a valuable precedent that they have the right to ban the US President from their platform.

Because it's political.

You're evaluating the ban in terms of Twitter as a moral regulator of discussion, not as a media company seeking to control a maximal share of the discourse. Trump was allowed to use the platform because media companies used it to follow him and Twitter wants everyone at CNN and FOX to be reading Twitter. Trump was always going to be permanently banned from Twitter when he was no longer politically relevant simply because he's broken the rules literally hundreds of times. It simply happens that he finally ranted himself into irrelevance (Facebook's ban helps here) and Twitter realized that they could push the ban up two weeks and snag a bit of the spotlight.

While I can understand Twitter's move, I think a permanent suspension of the account will do a disservice in the long run, at least the way it is implemented right now.

Each and every tweet by him now simply shows "This tweet is unavailable." See the legendary covfefe tweet, for instance: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/86976699489946828...

I would prefer if they marked his account as read-only. Maybe after the inauguration.

IANAL, but one possibility that comes to mind is that these examples are specifically chosen to limit liability. For example, if they banned Trump today based on comments he made a month ago, then someone could sue twitter for allowing speech they themselves admitted caused violence.

> then someone could sue twitter

Twitter is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which states in relevant part, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1).

Here, Twitter is the provider of the interactive computer service (Twitter) that will not be treated as publisher or speaker of the information (tweets) provided by another information content provider (@realDonaldTrump). Therefore, Twitter will not face any civil liability for Trump's tweets.

I'm scared for the inauguration. Already lots of chat on the same forums/parlor/etc

The scaffolding and wooden structure they were on is the JCCIC built platform, and that disgusting video of the tunnel is where POTUS walks out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJOgGsC0G9U

Ironically, I was worried about it before, but not now. Now that the Capitol Hill event has happened, the security effort will undoubtedly be multiplied multiple times over.

Patriots historically refer to citizens who have taken to arms to defend their country.

When has he ever used this term before to refer to his supporters?

It's not a good time to begin to refer to your supporters in the context of using weapons to defend the country on the heels of the capitol building being stormed and four people dying during a final election recount.

The thing about manipulation is it always claims plausible deniability. We all know this.

"It's heavily taking advantage of the moment." Umm yes. Regardless of whether you are a republican or a democrat, storming capitol hill during an election recount diminishes the validity of either party and the country as a whole. This country is the center for innovation and generally the most sought after democracy in the world. The entire world is watching. Taking advantage of the moment is exactly what he is doing. If you read about coups in the past there was never an explicit sentence that drew the line between now I am and evil dictator and now I am not. It was building an army of radicalized supporters, patriots, if you will while government officials around the person in power dropped like flies as things escalated much like what is happening now. We do not need to repeat history to say we proved he did it because by that time it will be too late.

It is clear for months trump has been warned of how this kind of inflammatory behavior will impact the people at large and potentially radicalize either side and he has been nothing but inflammatory.

If he really cared about securing democracy at large as opposed to his own power in office he would be taking extra precautions at this point.

He is doing the opposite.

I get what you mean though. Unfortunately both sides have significant radicalized sides now. And looting storming buildings and murdering law enforcement and lighting fire to buildings has been normalized now by both sides in 2020.

My parents are trumpers in the deep south and these are the things they have said to me in the past couple of days:

Mark Zuckerberg is an abusive dictator not Trump.

My mother condescendingly whispered to me poor thing noone told me all the protestors were antifa who knew if they didn't storm the building and steal the ballots that trump would win. So they were all actually secret democrats.

They both believe trump is the rightful president for the next term.

The news media reliably produces these “something must be done” stories that the powerful can then use as cover for actions they normally wouldn’t dare to take. And all at the same time - no coordination necessary, no central agenda, just an understanding that for some short period, all sorts of questionable actions will be excusable. A sort of Schelling point for anti-societal behaviour.

That may be a factor but I think it's pretty easy to see why banning him now (instead of earlier) could be done without the reasons you invoked:

1. His tweets didn't incite angry mobs to assault federal buildings before

2. Some time ago when Twitter was defending why they aren't banning his account, they said something about this effectively being a public government account so banning it would do more bad than good (and instead Twitter went ahead and "annotated" his tweets instead of just removing them). This determination had both pros and cons for Trump, the pro being much harder to ban his account but the con being that he couldn't block people from replying to his tweets anymore. With him now out of office his account loses that status so it should be much easier to ban it.

> Perhaps they have a strategic reason for going about this how they did

One advantage may be that once the context is forgotten it will appear that Twitter has set a low bar for banning a powerful world leader from the platform.

Regardless of your beliefs, today is a sad day for free speech.

By that if you mean 'violent inciting free speech', then yes, sad day for that.

I’m for all speech. Regardless if I agree with it or not. I would rather debate ideas I disagree with rather than they fester underground.

“violent inciting free speech” is a subject take on Trump’s tweets whether you like it or not. I’d rather make that distinction for myself instead of relying on the judgment of some Twitter employee I’ve never met.

Yes, I can make my own judgements from the tweets, so don't need some Twitter employee to tell me the same. I think he should have been banned a lot sooner.

Cool, and you're free to block any account you want. Twitter even provides multiple ways to avoid seeing an account. So the issue was already solved. No need to further censor ideas. Individuals can make their own decision.

I will block his account, but his followers will not, that's precisely the problem, and the whole point. They will commit violence and vandalize public property instead.

So your goal then is to memory hole any account that could lead to anyone using it as justification for violence? You sound like middle-aged moms in the 90s that blamed violent video games and metal music for school shootings.

> So your goal then is to memory hole any account that could lead to anyone using it as justification for violence

Yes, but only if he/she has massive following that can actually incite "mob violence". With great power, comes great responsibility, while Trump is a kid who has been blaming everyone else for his defeat.

why? twitter isn't the government, nothing is stopping anyone's free speech.

Absolutely the opposite of your sentiment.

Would you agree that there are many ways to deliver a message? Do you think verbally insulting my friends to the point where they can no longer communicate with me is freedom of speech?. Things are not black and white

I agree. Verbally assaulting, belittling someone, or having a physical fight never has and never will solve any problems. However, that would only be the case if we lived in a perfect world. History tells us otherwise. Also, how someone delivers their message is more deeply rooted into a persons upbringing/nurturing and life experiences than being told how to act. I personally have a couple friends that I refer to as short-fused, they tend to loose their temper in no time and over things I would think are unimportant. However, I’ve accepted them as friends because I know that those small spurts of rage do not represent their genuine friendship with me (this is from knowing them over 10 years). I’m 40 at this point and something I’ve come to realize is that every person has a cut-off age, after which, no matter what you try to teach or tell them, they will not be able to change their way of life (specifically how they interact). Does that mean that they’re a bad person? I wouldn’t know until I am personally able to engage into an interaction with him or her. My wisdom has confirmed to never judge a book by its cover and that was not the case when I was in high school. My few cents. Happy new year bud!

I can't agree, this is the peak of the trump era, a last hoorah for him and his followers. They will now be pushed to the fringe and Trump will go to jail for a significant amount of time in New York for serious tax fraud and bank fraud no doubt.

>It's strange that they picked such a poor way to justify the ban when they could have made a significantly stronger case

Doing so is an advantage if you want to create a display of raw power. The poorer the justification, the better.

(Also because apparently I have to state this explicitly in every comment related to Trump: I do not support Trump, his supporters, the recent events that occurred at the capitol, etc etc)

It is a horrible state of affairs where you need this disclaimer in order for your ideas to be taken more seriously. Not directed at you personally, but as a descriptor of the situation.

Is it any surprise people are angry and furious and lashing out when they are dismissed solely on having differences of opinions from the establishment?

Twitter, Facebook et al. have been getting a lot of flak recently for having algorithms that lead to radicalization of users (i.e. maximizing engagement/controversy for ad revenue). I think Trump is the best scapegoat they have for the alt-right radicalization phenomenon, rather than the platform themselves. The events that transpired recently are a perfect distraction for a deeper problem that lies with Big Tech.

(Similarly... I don't support Trump either, etc. etc.)

Another possibility: Twitter and Facebook have become aware of skulduggery in progress that we don't know anything about yet, such as a plot centered on the inauguration ceremony on the 20th, and don't want anything to do with its participants.

Facebook in particular will obviously be the first to know about any such plot, long before any intelligence or law-enforcement agency. Twitter wouldn't be far behind.

He’s not going to be in power much longer, so there’s no harm ruffling his feathers now. They have confirmation with the Biden certification. That’s really all it is.

Is it just my perception, or is their actual justification using the 2 quoted tweets kinda weak? Interpreting his boycott of an event as a call to violence seems like a huge stretch. It seems like they wanted to shoehorn a justification using his 2 latest tweets when the actual reason goes back further.

No, that's not just you. They probably wanted to align with other social media platforms, who had already permanently suspended him yesterday.

They hardly need to make a court case at this point.

They didn’t just look at the tweets; they looked at how they’re actually being received. I think that’s a crucial distinction.

I'm receiving your benign post in a harmful manner. What should we do in this situation?

How many police officers have you killed since receiving this post?

The same amount killed from those two trump tweets

No mention of the hundreds of preceded them?

Actions have consequences.

As a data point, I haven't killed anyone because of trump tweets

The people that receive Trump tweets and go on to attempt a violent insurrection against the government are admittedly in the long tail; I don't think that fact negates the fact it happened.

But isn't there always a long tail that will cause chaos or take things in a bad way? Especially with the sheer size of Trump's audience.

It's not as though Donald Trump was tweeting about his favourite national holidays since the election and some lone wolf got the wrong idea.

Donald Trump has consistently used his Twitter account to demonise the people that were in the building that was attacked. He suggested that the Democratic Party, in coalition with a supposed 'deep state', systematically rigged an election. He posted and retweeted outrageous conspiracies about how these forces worked to steal the election and abrogate the American constitution.

More than that, he used his Twitter account to promote the very rally that preceded the act of insurrection.

> I hope the Democrats, and even more importantly, the weak and ineffective RINO section of the Republican Party, are looking at the thousands of people pouring into D.C. They won’t stand for a landslide election victory to be stolen. @senatemajldr @JohnCornyn @SenJohnThune

> Washington is being inundated with people who don’t want to see an election victory stolen by emboldened Radical Left Democrats. Our Country has had enough, they won’t take it anymore! We hear you (and love you) from the Oval Office. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

> The “Surrender Caucus” within the Republican Party will go down in infamy as weak and ineffective “guardians” of our Nation, who were willing to accept the certification of fraudulent presidential numbers!

> How can you certify an election when the numbers being certified are verifiably WRONG. You will see the real numbers tonight during my speech, but especially on JANUARY 6th. @SenTomCotton Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!

> 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!

> “Georgia election data, just revealed, shows that over 17,000 votes illegally flipped from Trump to Biden.” @OANN This alone (there are many other irregularities) is enough to easily “swing Georgia to Trump”. #StopTheSteal @HawleyMO @SenTedCruz @Jim_Jordan

> The number of cases and deaths of the China Virus is far exaggerated in the United States because of @CDCgov’s ridiculous method of determination compared to other countries, many of whom report, purposely, very inaccurately and low. “When in doubt, call it Covid.” Fake News!

> An attempt to steal a landslide win. Can’t let it happen! https://t.co/sKn4iTjUy0

> ....that, quite frankly, didn’t have much of a chance, like 7, 8 or 9. The Presidential Election was Rigged with hundreds of thousands of ballots mysteriously flowing into Swing States very late at night as everyone thought the election was easily won by me. There were many....

> I will be speaking at the SAVE AMERICA RALLY tomorrow on the Ellipse at 11AM Eastern. Arrive early — doors open at 7AM Eastern. BIG CROWDS! https://t.co/k4blXESc0c

> RT @AmyKremer: We are excited to announce the site of our January 6th event will be The Ellipse in the President’s Park, just steps from th…

https://www.thetrumparchive.com/

This is an outrageous standard to hold over a person. So if any whackjob reads a politician's statement and subsequently commits a crime the politician should be held responsible by the media and removed from office. I've reviewed a transcript of Trump's 6th January speech and there is no incitement to commit crimes in it. I am not intimately familiar with Trump's tweeting history but my guess is there is no incitement to commit crimes in that body of text either.

I posted some of his recent Twitter activity in response to another comment.

I'll allow you to make up your own mind as to whether a reasonable person could determine there was a proximate cause between his tweeting and the violent acts on 6 January.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25693620

Construct your own bubble of reality to legitimise any and all actions you might choose to take?

If it's only you, then nothing.

I suspect no matter what we do you’re going to continue arguing in bad faith while pretending nothing happened Wednesday and Trump isn’t sui generis.

Prove their point by getting millions of others to also receive it in a harmful manner and then also have them take violent action.

Ah, but here's the rub: danaliv isn't (I don't think...) the President of the United States, much less one who has repeatedly offered support and comfort to people who have committed acts of violence and insurrection.

Context matters.

> danaliv isn't (I don't think...) the President of the United States

Now there’s a terrifying thought.

The problem is whether through incompetence or on purpose, Donald Trump has a history of being unable to - unequivocally - denounce the people that do this shit in his name. He always throws in random bullshit that they can interpret as support for their actions and goals.

Personally I just think he has a hard time saying bad things about people that support him. But it's a pretty big fucking problem when they're doing things like this.

The tweets were not benign, and the repercussions were obvious and many people predicted this outcome. You are being hopelessly obtuse because you are blinded by fanaticism.

They've wanted to ban him since day one. They just have the political backing to do it now.

They have bent over backwards to keep him on the platform...

They have absolutely not wanted to ban him since day 1. He brings in millions of users and clicks.

Two competing interests: let's ban our political opponent and let's keep our cash cow.

The middle management & line workers of Twitter can monetize their small Twitter stock portfolios pretty quick without shifting the market all that much. Jack, on the other hand, would take a major hit if he tried to sell off his.

=edit=

Clarification on content_sesh's good point: I don't assume whether Jack agrees or disagrees with Trump's points. They are billionaires, might be "frenemies" for all we know. I do assume Jack likes a cash-cow for his major property, Twitter - and tries to balance the upsides & downsides of hosting Trump's contentious content.

I"m not sure where you're getting the idea that Jack disagrees with most or even many of Trump's policies.

edit to clarify in response to parent's edit (lol):

I don't doubt Twitter enjoyed being the primary platform for our extremely online president. I was getting at the "political opponents" thing. I feel there's a tendency where people like Jack and Zuckerburg get categorized as "not on the right politically", because they work in tech and live in California I guess. I disagree with that characterization, and my main reason is how they've allowed their platforms to be used.

For a very long time now, I've personally seen Twitter being used to amplify regressive, right-wing views while quashing (via suspension or permanent suspension) leftist voices that challenge them. The best way I can describe it succinctly would be a pervasive double-standard when applying their rules. So I, personally, specifically do not believe that Jack or Twitter leadership have aligned themselves politically against the right.

>Jack or Twitter leadership

There's clear and strong undercurrent of Twitter employees and middle management expressing opposition to Trump, and also expressing sympathy to various left wing causes. Similar to other tech firms, like Google or Facebook.

That's why I point out conflict of interest inside Twitter. Might be partly ownership stake matter, partly cultural matter - employees tend to be a generation younger than management, and tend to have gone through a different path through life.

Bingo. Think back to 2015 and how Twitter was doing back then. I don’t know how many millions of real users they’ve added since then, but the Trump presidency has been a boon for them. Way more people on the platform, and tons of them will stick around even after the ban.

I think that's a bit cynical. This is the President of the USA we're talking about. His words matter for the sake of history. I believe it was smart to capture a log of his statements. It will be essential to the record. They should have also disallowed him from deleting tweets, but I suspect they have a copy of everything he ever posted since they claimed it was significant discourse.

Hitler’s words matter for the sake of history but I don’t have to sell them in my book store.

But it would be a trove of data if we did.

We don't know the Minoan language, and we get by. But that doesn't mean we don't value knowing Greek.

Pretty sure you can buy Mein Kampf at most US bookstores. I know I bought a copy in high school, though I never did get around to reading it.

The responsibility of archiving presidential records should really not fall on a private company. If I had to put money on whether Twitter will be around a couple of decades from now, it'll be an easy "no".

I'd be very surprised if all Trump's tweets weren't scraped and saved in official archives.

I believe the Library of Congress archives all historically relevant tweets. Up until 2017-ish they archived every single one.

I've often wondered if he has any idea how much money Twitter has made off of him.

They didn’t want to lose his audience to a competitor more than they wanted to ban him. It’s not political backing, it’s preferring money over morals.

They start deleting all kinds of pro trump accounts.

The only reason they’re finally banning him is because his worth runs out in 12 days.

Dumping him now allows Twitter to virtue signal and avoid looking like an enabler of literal violence, all while giving up virtually nothing in return.

Kind of like how his cabinet members are now resigning. No big loss for them, as they’ll be out of a job shortly anyway. Might as well “stand up to him” while they still have the opportunity to reap political kudos.

Speculation and accusations are distinctly unhelpful.

If you have any evidence of Twitter's motivations, please post it. A leak of the internal e-mail traffic on this decision, if published, would be fascinating.

If not- If you're just asserting as fact your own assumptions about a company whose decision you don't like, then please go troll elsewhere.

>Speculation and accusations are distinctly unhelpful.

Unless you are the one making them, apparently.

I’m not trolling. And I made no “accusations”. I have no objection to Twitter’s decision. Sorry I didn’t make that clear.

Trump brought immense traffic to Twitter. Jack Dorsey is simply virtue signaling now that he’s reaped everything he can from Trump’s existence on the platform... social media has far too much power, and the heads of these organizations are not your friends.

I do not support or endorse Trump or his cronies.

Agreed. I don't disagree with the ban, but their justification is weak.

If you're saying they don't have a good reason, but you dont like the guy so you're glad it happened to him... don't you see how this is a problematic precedent? If trump supporters were in the majority would it be ok for them to censor democrats?

No, I'm saying _this_ reason was bad, the one cited. I think that there was plenty better evidence from his past tweet history to justify it.

Yeah I feel the same way. I don’t like Trump but Twitter’s justification is weak and their message is pandering to the masses. No sustenance.

Agreed. It very well may be coded speak to rile up some supporters and drive them to violence, but that's hardly clear to the average observer. There are so many other instances of direct calls to incite violence, it's rather sad that these were the two that broke the camel's back.

The problem with saying speech is a "dog whistle" is that there is no defense against it. If people in power do not trust my words, then how can I convince them that they are trustworthy without appeasing them?

I agree, inciting that violent mob to storm the Capitol building, while a join session was certifying the election seems to be a better reason.

It's extremely weak, but that doesn't matter. Twitter has been wanting to do this for a very long time. This was the perfect catalyst and they're going to be lauded for doing so by the left.

Partly maybe, but for most it‘s too little, too late. Banning him for two of his weakest tweets on a history of four years of inciting hatred, bigotism and violence does not put a good light on Twitter.

This smells like some extremely transparent opportunism after all they‘ve earned with 45.

I couldn't have said it any better. It's pure opportunism and moral grandstanding.

The problem is half the country sees the world in a different way. They already are yelling "censorship".

As a matter of fact this is censorship.

That's a matter of opinion.

The strongest part of it seems to be that they cite specific activity on Twitter to organise a second attack on the Capitol which is directly linked to these tweets. It seems reasonable to me on the basis that they are basing their actions on actual risk of actual violence occurring as a result of statements. So they have ignored everything up to now because there was not tangible evidence that violence could result. They're now in a position where there is tangible evidence that violence is a realistic outcome from Trump's words, and this has altered their interpretation of his statements generally.

I have wondered this for the last few years, but why do people refer to Trump as 45? No other president that I can recall has been referred index number of their presidency, I do not see people calling President Obama "44" or President Bush "43"

it is odd to me

I definitely recall Bush being referred to as "43", especially to distinguish him from 41.

Thanks, I wonder if that is origin of the usage..

Hmm... might be!

Even among the two of them, they used these as nicknames.

It lead to a lot of discussion of Grover Cleveland back in the day.

Basically, it's the loud uncle who's been screaming nonsense the whole dinner party, and now he's just shoved you and you fell down. The host told him to go to the other room and take 10 minutes to calm down. Now he comes back and returns to screaming...

As others have pointed out, Twitter put Trump on notice that another violation would result in a permanent ban.

I'm not sure why you felt compelled to mention "the left" in this context. Are you implying that Twitter wants to curry favor with the left? Or perhaps that if the left is happy, then it's a bad thing? I feel like there is some subtext that you might as well just spell out.

My take, and I hope I’m wrong, is they want to set a tone for a clear agenda. It goes back to the early XX century when when you wanted to control people you ensured taking over the media first and foremost.

Can someone explain what the XX century is?

20th century in roman numerals

I think you're thinking of MM, which was the last year of the 20th century.

That would be MCMXCIX

No, 2000 was the last year. There was no year zero.

Hmm, interesting - I stand corrected. So the first millennium was years 1 through 1000. First I've heard of it! Another casualty of 1-based indexing I suppose. Perhaps the people setting the system up didn't have a concept of 'zero'?

There is a Seinfeld episode that covers this topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennium_(Seinfeld)

We're still a few years out from the 2000th century.

Roman numerals for 20... not a normal convention by any means in MMXXI

It is a normal convention in Europe (or at least parts of it).

http://letmegooglethat.com/?q=XX+century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Modern_use_in_c...

It is the standard way of writing the century in many European countries/languages.

I think the first tweet is a good argument. I personally think second tweet is not only a stretch it's the exact kind of tweet POTUS should have been using Twitter. He just says, in a normal manner, "I won't attend X" without SHOUTING or using weird adjectives like "nasty woman" or whatever.

I think it's important to understand that Twitter needs to be very conservative here. All social media banned Trump, and twitter really is the last place his voice can be heard (via a famous privately-owned social media organ). Well, if Trump tweets "I'm gonna nuke Iran" tomorrow they don't want to be the place Trump announces this.

Well, if Trump tweets "I'm gonna nuke Iran" tomorrow they don't want to be the place Trump announces this.

That is a far better argument for permanently suspending his account than what they cobbled together.

This is a simple extrapolation of their argument:

> Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks.

Look at this record. Trump is the only President in the last 30 years that did not start a War or major military action.

Soleimani

>twitter really is the last place his voice can be heard

He's the POTUS !!!! He can be on more or less every media outlet on the entire planet in a few seconds if he so chose.

Not at all certain. Major outlets have cut him off on several occasions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/01/cnn-msnbc...

I knew someone would bring this up. YMMV but I do not believe that if Trump, as POTUS, called a press conference and did not say stuff that was demonstrably and immediately verifiable as untrue, no network would cut him off. Even today. Or tomorrow.

Agree. It would have looked better to just pick any of the top 100 worse recent tweets (which these aren’t). Or simply none at all.

It’s a correct (late) call, but using these quotes will read to those who disagree as “we have nothing we just want to shut him down” which is unfortunate.

Sadly, with how bad faith most things from Trump have been, I have to say I don't believe you on this one.

Should it be weak, on just what you are looking at? I mean, yeah. You don't have to look hard to find that this is more than "merely" plausible. Odds are ridiculously high that the tweets were more fanning of flames.

Yup and it might backfire in twitter's face because now apparently there is a mass exodus of conservatives going to platforms like parler. It is very likely that Trump will switch platforms and that will bring pressure on the stock price.

I sold my TWTR shares and advise others to do the same.

What is the point of going to Parler if you are just talking to each other and agreeing ? Value of Twitter is that you are reaching a broader audience

They are under a (false) impression that they are the majority and when everyone moves to Parler the broader audience will be on their platform. And twitter will become a place where the left is just talking to each other and agreeing. Of course, as we can all see the reality is completely opposite. On any conservative platform you'll find a narrow audience discussing only one thing - politics. And it's boring to discuss only politics, even to them.

What's the point of twitter if your favorite commentators aren't even on there? That's the issue. There will likely be a mass exodus of other conservative commentators to parler.

For someone like Trump with a bruised ego, being welcomed by everyone like a religious figure can be very appealing I think.

Do you see the irony in your comment?

Echo, meet chamber.

No, I don’t see the irony. Can you elaborate? Twitter will still have ~some conservatives ~, media, tech people, CEOs, athletes, global politicians etc. Parler will only have conservative politicians and their supporters from the US

I shouldn't have to explain, but if Twitter is drained of conservative thought then it also becomes a political echo chamber of the left.

I'd rather see folks talking even if they don't agree than not talking at all. When you're talking you're not fighting.

Parler will be a much bigger echo chamber than Twitter. That’s my point

I’m sure there exist those that soooo very much want this to affect Twitter’s stock price. But the reality is more likely that the number of those deleting their accounts and moving to Parler isn’t even a rounding error; floating point math on computers isn’t that precise.

The next quarterly will be interesting to see what actually went on. DAU will be key.

In light of everything that's happened this week, I think the first tweet could easily be interpreted as having been intended to further stoke his followers' outrage. The 2nd tweet, while somewhat factual, I think also came off as incendiary and divisive. What excuse does he have at this point for not attending the inauguration other than to make yet another spiteful statement to increase tensions and, therefore, incite more violence?

The full comments in the post detail similar reasoning.

Update: As many people have pointed out (and as the Twitter post mentions), the 2nd tweet could also be interpreted as emphasizing that it would be safe to commit further violence at an event that he won't be attending. This is certainly a much more grave concern than the one I mentioned above.

I hate the guy, but TBH when I saw the tweet I just thought "Little baby can't even muster up some courage to show up, and he's throwing more tantrum... par for the course for him."

But now as I write this, I do realize, he didn't need to announce his no-show 12 days beforehand, he can just quietly not show up on the day, so this tweet does seem to be more of a signal to... well, incredibly, it's a signal for the members of his cult that they can attack the inauguration!

No, those are what reality-based analysis looks like. You don't just pretend your principles control the world, you look at the way the world actually works.

Words are never in a vacuum. The way they are interpreted matters. And it's false to claim you can't control how people are going to interpret what you say. Especially not when you've spent years training particular subgroups to interpret things exactly the way they are.

This move is long overdue. Trump has been using this sort of language to promote stochastic violence for many years. It's not to Twitter's credit that they had to see the Capitol building overrun by insurrectionists before understanding that it's real and has been going on for years.

But the analysis of the effect of those specific tweets is accurate.

A devout pro-life person could use this exact justification to claim pro-choice people are promoting baby killing.

The argument would work the same way if reality was the same, sure. I'd think there was a very severe problem if there was someone going around broadcasting messages that thousands of people interpreted as orders to terminate fetuses.

But that's not what's happening, so the same argument doesn't apply. No doctor believes they're on a a holy mission to end pregnancies. No one is looking for a leader to reinforce this viewpoint. That's very different from the reality in this situation.

That's very much what's happening. The latest year for which I can find easy data (2018)[0] shows that over 600,000 legal abortions took place. That is aided and abetted by messaging that the primary concern is an expectant mother's choice to terminate or not, and the feticide is often deliberately obfuscated by concerns about general obstetric health, even though very few pregnancies pose a significant health risk that would require termination. Now don't get me wrong, I'm pro-choice, but we should be honest about what's going on here. Even pro-choice advocates always talk about it "not being an easy decision" for most women, so there is definitely a lot of persuasion at work, both in direct consultation and in broader messages spread by leaders, advocacy groups, and the like. It doesn't change the reality of feticide, which depending on your ethics, can be considered a wicked act.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/ss/ss6907a1.htm

Ok, I read the data and... I don't see anywhere where someone is broadcasting messages that some people have been conditioned to believe are orders to terminate pregnancies.

Where is that happening?

And "not an easy choice" is exactly my point. Are you under the impression doctors council in favor of terminating pregnancies outside of cases where there is a health risk to the woman? I've seen a few claims of that from anti-abortion activists, but I've never seen anything resembling proof of those claims. Given how strong such proof would be in support of their argument, I would be surprised if there is any pattern of such behavior. (Yes, I'm aware they have some videos they claim are exactly this, but given that the only videos they release are highly edited, I'm rather suspicious that those edits removed a lot of important information. An unambiguous problem wouldn't need a lot of editing.)

Doctors will provide abortions to the people who choose to get them. I don't see any evidence that there are people who believe they are being instructed to have or perform abortions.

I see quite a lot of very strong evidence people are being told the election results are invalid, insurrection is necessary to right an injustice, and that there are people who believe they are being called upon to carry out that insurrection. My source? The claims the president has made repeatedly and the insurrection attempt on Wednesday.

These things are different. One is very obvious to everyone with their eyes open. The other one still lacks evidence. When the important part of the situation is the link between an action and its effect on others, the ease in observing that connection is the context.

So no. The same argument doesn't work. The pattern of facts is quite different.

Taken in isolation the two tweets in particular don't seem that much crazier than anything else he has said over the past four years. However, given the overall context of what happened on Wednesday and the (now deleted) tweets leading up to the incident, there is sufficient justification (IMO) for a ban from those prior tweets alone.

Snowflakes gonna flake.

Would you please stop posting flamewar and political battle comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of account. The idea of this site is curious, thoughtful conversation. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting.

I realize lots of other people are breaking them also, but that's not an excuse to do it yourself.

Thanks for your efforts at moderating. This thread seems like it might be particularly thankless task, so here is some counter appreciation.

It's always been a balancing act, weighing the newsworthiness of broadcasting the words of the POTUS versus the potential damage.

The actions of his followers this week have finally tipped the scales too far.

When I saw the cryptic 1 sentence tweet that he wasn't going to be there, the first thing that came to mind was that he was telling his supporters indirectly that they could do whatever they wanted since he wouldn't be in harms way.

So perhaps it is a huge stretch to some, but we need to remember it is also not a stretch at all to many, especially given the recent events. Therein lies the danger.

Same. If anything I was a bit surprised to see Twitter go there and read between the lines.

But that was my immediate first thought, and likely that of a large number of folks.

I've been browsing thedonald.win today to see how his supporters are reacting to recent events, and that is one of the ways some users interpreted his tweet. Other than that, a ton of crazy theories. They literally take any two-three words from his tweets and make it mean whatever they want it to mean. To give you an example, in one of the recent tweets he put words "GIANT VOICE" in caps and they interpreted it as a reference to a military communication system with the same name. From that other people started theorizing how Trump will use the military system to circumvent the "big tech censorship" and deliver some dirty secrets about his "enemies"

So, looking from that perspective any tweet of any person could be taken down because some conspiracy theorist interpreted it in a particular way. And in their heads, this ban only gives them more "proof" that they are right.

Incidentally* about half an hour ago:

>from discord: "While there is no evidence of the server being used to organize the Jan 6 riots, Discord decided to ban the entire server today due to its overt connection to an online forum used to incite violence and plan an armed insurrection in the United States"

Cloudfare is still serving thedonald.win though.

* https://twitter.com/alibreland/status/1347694525930680320

> "So, looking from that perspective any tweet of any person could be taken down because some conspiracy theorist interpreted it in a particular way."

And yet only Trump attracts this sort of lunatic following. Let's be honest, he does speak in a particular way and avoids statements with clear interpretations. And arguably he actively plays with the occult crowd's obsession with hidden meanings and symbolism.

Fact is, his communications do have severe, real consequences and he fails to recognize that. It is therefore completely irrelevant how something could possibly interpreted otherwise. Human communication doesn't work like that. There is context, state and prediction, which cannot be ignored.

I saw the tweet as acknowledgement that Biden will be president. I have never once thought the Trump would attend Biden's inauguration as that doesn't seem in character for him. I think that Twitter does themself a disfavor by using such weak evidence of Trump's violations of the terms of service.

There's worry that Trump's supporters are seeing it as "Trump's not at the inauguration, time to riot again since he won't be there".

I think that's important to contextualize: these people are insane and are acting on these tweets. The Q people dissect these tweets twisting them to confirm their conspiracy beliefs.

They thought that Trump's tweet about transition meant that he would fire Pence and that's the transition, applying numerology.

At this point no matter what he says it's dangerous because of the thousands (millions?) of deranged psychopathic terrorists he has created who read them and act violently no matter what he says.

> these people are insane

While I agree with your emotions, the use of the word "insane" might be counterproductive. As a group, we're mostly optimistic, trying to find the best interpretation of actions.

"Insane" implies that these people are not in control of themselves or their actions. That's not what is going on: they are fully in control and are CHOOSING to feed themselves with conspiracy theories... hoping to undo the 2020 election.

I don't know what word to use to describe them. Conspirators might be more accurate and helpful.

Ex:

> I think that's important to contextualize: these people are conspirators and are acting on these tweets. The Q people dissect these tweets twisting them to confirm their conspiracy beliefs.

By and large, these people are NOT suffering from any mental illness. They'll be going to work on Monday, and will probably take off this weekend, maybe go to Church on Sunday. They are choosing to participate in the conspiracy.

maybe. what's a better word though?

Are they really in control? That word is too coarse I think for the situation. HN talks all the time about the power of social media, the studies showing quick radicalization, etc. That implies some level of manipulation e.g. not 100% free will.

None of us are subject to 100% free will. I'm influencing your opinion of the situation right now. My words have some degree of power over you.

That doesn't mean I'm responsible for your actions or your words. We draw the line at individual responsibility for a reason. Its not perfect, but the buck stops at your own actions.

------

I'm sure you trust in a fair number of leaders. I don't know who your role models are, but if they started calling for violent insurrection, it would be your choice whether to follow them down that path of degeneracy.

> While I agree with your emotions, the use of the word "insane" might be counterproductive.

I suggest “highly suggestible.”

Hmmm... maybe "brainwashed"

Sometimes it makes sense to keep things simple. These people are insane even if they are able to manage certain aspects of life. Call a spade a spade and let things fall where they will.

Simple is better. But "better" is also better. I'm not trying to make things more complex, we need to simplify our message if we want to change opinions at this time.

I'm settling on "brainwashed" for now. "Insane" colloquially removes the sense of responsibility and even has a positive connotation at times. Brainwashed captures the precise situation best.

Brainwashed individuals are still responsible for their actions. But we recognize the outside influence upon their actions. We can use the word brainwashed to recognize that these individuals still deserve punishment, but also recognize that there's a greater-source of influence we also must dismantle.

---------

The dude who has 10,000 edits on Wikipedia is "insane". A runner who completes 4:40 mile run is "insane". The mob who stormed the Capitol are BRAINWASHED.

"Brainwashed" fits better than "insane".

Okay, so the solution to calm these crazy people down is for twitter to ban Trump and then post his tweets that supposedly call for violence on their blog, so the Streisand effect will kick in and even more people will see it? I think that at this point you have to ask yourself whether twitter's goal is actually stopping the violence and not provoking it.

That's fair!

Its not about stopping these messages.

Its about stopping the messages Trump would have sent next two weeks. You know, when the attacks on the inauguration are planned (The 17th is also popping up as another attack date, but I dunno if that has any actual symbolism going on...)

Planned attack? No, I'm afraid I don't know anything about that.

The latest video that Trump posted there was that the protestors will be prosecuted and that he basically concedes and will transition power over to Biden. At no point, including his latest tweets on the @POTUS account that were deleted within minutes, have I seen anything that would suggest that he's planning any kind of "attack". And in fact, I see it the opposite way. If my reading of the situation is correct, he's trying to control the damage and calm down his base precisely so nothing like this will happen, because he believes that there is still future for him, as the tweet in question suggest. It could very well be that he was the only person that was keeping his supporters from starting the actual uprising and not whatever the Capitol thing was. And now it might be gone.

Obviously that's my opinion, but if you actually don't want any violence to happen, you better hope that I'm wrong about this.

Trump isn't planning the attack.

Parlor / thedonald.win are planning it. The question is whether or not the president will take advantage of those groups and try to coordinate them better.

Without a head, those groups ability to coordinate an attack would be hampered.

Google and Apple are banning parlor and other apps too, cutting off cell phone traffic.

> the first thing that came to mind was that he was telling his supporters indirectly that they could do whatever they wanted since he wouldn't be in harms way

Wow, it would have never occurred to me to read it like this, but then I am hopeless at teasing out hidden meanings from what people say. To me, this is just so consistent with the overall picture of him that's been consistently painted in the media, and which he only verifies by his own behavior — that of a stubborn, spoilt, petulant child — that I can't but take his words at face value, i.e. that he's informing the world that he won't show up because of spite.

I am also amused that there seems to be a non-negligible amount of people who apparently care whether he will or will not attend the ceremony. To a foreigner like me, it just sounds so insignificant and puny.

A symbolic gesture signaling approval of the peaceful transition of power for arguably the most powerful political apparatus on earth is quite significant to a lot of Americans. It is probably considerably less interesting to people watching from the outside.

The symbolism of him attending is much more important to me than the symbolism of him staying away.

Few people will start a riot if he is there transferring power to the new president.

A legion of people will show up to disrupt the proceedings if he isn’t.

> that of a stubborn, spoilt, petulant child

could be that and also him accidentally stoking the flames of stochastic terror.

Read the Turner Diaries.

This is the same type of conspiracies that the right is accused of having. Was there anyway that he could have announced he was boycotting the inauguration and it wouldn't be taken this way by some?

His supporters were literally talking about that exact scenario in the replies

> His supporters

All 70 million?

You don't need 70 million people for organizers on Parler to be dangerous.

Just because someone voted from Trump doesn't mean they support him.

> This is the same type of conspiracies that the right is accused of having. Was there anyway that he could have announced he was boycotting the inauguration and it wouldn't be taken this way by some?

Yes. He could have accepted the results of the election and not promoted conspiracies.

He could specifically say there will be a transition to a Biden administration, not just a "new" one, which Capitol storming types have decided means a Trump-Flynn administration, after ousting the traitor Pence. They are continuing to have these fever dreams.

Trump's critics are always over-analyzing what he says trying to look for secret incitements of violence and nazi dog whistles and conspiracies when reality is much simpler - he's just a sore loser who isn't attending out of spite.

That is entirely possible. But his supporters will not read it that way.

The most powerful person on the planet should be held to a higher standard than just blating out whatever is on his mind.

Once the election was lost it was a forgone conclusion he was going to be banned.

This is weak justification and anyone with a non-partisan mind, or does not suffer from such an extreme bias agaist the target of this ban should be worried about the future of online censorship.

However I am sure this will simply fall on deaf ears as Never Trump's will celebrate with out even considering the bigger picture, and Trump supports will view this just further evidence the system as rigged against Trump

The ironic thing is this will do nothing to clam the most extreme of Trump supports most of whom have already been banned from twitter anyway, if anything this is tossing gasoline on the dumpster fire

The thing is, Twitter has data on how people responded to those two Tweets. If Trump gets prosecuted, I expect we will see responses to Trumps tweets as evidence in court. My guess is they can make a statistical causal claim. Example, what if some of those who broke into the capital earlier replied to one of Trump's tweets in such a way as to suggest they were incited by Trump?

Were those actual people, or bots? Did the people say "yes, let's do a violent thing" or did Twitter interpret "yes, we will not give up" as a response to a dog whistle? There is no analysis showing how they came to that conclusion, and there is no trust in them from those who affected by these bans.

I agreed when I first read the tweets but the explanation about how the tweets have been interpreted as possibly causing more violence it’s now possible anything DJT says on Twitter will be taken as being promoting violence. This is unfortunate but it was Trump’s goal in many of the statements he’s made in the past.

You forget that he was already under a "soft ban" due to his previous activities on the platform. This was just the confirmation that he didn't change his behavior.

these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks.

This was my exact initial reaction.

However, suppose that Bill Clinton, George Bush, or Barack Obama had declined to attend the inauguration of there predecessors. That would surely trigger a crisis worthy of de-platforming. We’ve become somewhat numb to this sort of thing.

I guess my second draft would have said, “We’ve allowed DJT a platform because he is the President of the United States. In light of all that he has said on Twitter over the last 10+ years, though, he is guilty of inciting hate and violence among his followers. [Cite myriad tweets and cases.] We were going to wait until he left office to suspend his account. In light of his most recent tweets indicating that he would not attend the inauguration, we think it prudent to move up this timeline...”

>suppose that Bill Clinton, George Bush, or Barack Obama had declined to attend the inauguration of there predecessors. That would surely trigger a crisis worthy of de-platforming.

What? Let's say Obama had declined to attend Trump's inauguration. I don't think Twitter would ban him for that.

Yeah, I can't imagine that scenario at all. In fact, Obama publicly refusing to attend Trump's inauguration would have probably been met with thunderous applause from the "not my president" crowd.

Maybe if he had declined to attend and refused to recognize the results of the election by falsely claiming fraud and spreading misinformation? And encouraged people to storm the capitol? Maybe then it’d make sense for Obama to have been banned.

Democrats have fought him tooth and nail for four years,tried to impeach him, claimed his presidency is not legit and a sham or worse. So why do they need or want some symbolic transfer of power from a foreign operative taking orders from Putin ;) It seems he is only now accepted as president at zero hour so he can symbolically pass the torch.

Bush Jr. did not attend.

He was on an aircraft flying to Texas. This is memorable because the FAA had to modify software to support the callsign of an aircraft changing during flight, in this case from Air Force One to something else.

Do you have a source for this? Wikipedia says he did, even more curious about changing the call sign story:

> Outgoing President George W. Bush, outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney, former presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, and former vice presidents Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle, and Al Gore, along with their respective wives, attended the inauguration...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_inauguration_of_Barack...

Huh. Strange that DoD has a photo of President and Mrs. Bush leaving the inauguration with President and Mrs. Obama, if President Bush wasn't there.

https://www.defense.gov/observe/photo-gallery/igphoto/200115...

Could be a signal he expects violence at the inauguration. They really should just do it indoors in a joint session of Congress.

No, those precise justifications were born-out en masse today on Parler, /pol/, & 8kun.

Can you loop the rest of us in? What happened today on those forums?

They are already plotting their next terrorist event for the inauguration

Im sure they are plotting a terrorist attack in a public site for all to see /s

Right. Because they already did it once, and most haven't gotten punished for it yet.

They’re posting specific dates and plans around lots of violence in the near future. It’s around if you go looking. Not by people with low follower count. That’s why parler is getting hit by Google play and Apple

The phrase you are looking for is 'cumulative effect'.

you should go check out far right communities online, to them he may as well have said "Storm the inauguration on the 20th." He 100% deserved to be banned just for that comment's kairos.

It was very weak, and in my opinion, is likely to have catastrophic consequences. They have - purposely, it seems - drawn battle lines for a further divided country. This will be seen by conservatives as a wholesale rejection of all conservative speech on the platform. They are going to abandon Twitter in favor of a clone that will welcome Trump. We will then have a conservative Twitter, and the existing liberal Twitter.

Without the important balance between left and right, it’s going to be a free for all on both sides, with each amping each other up to retreat further and further into extreme parts of their respective sides. Twitter just inserted a nuclear bomb into the already delicate fault lines between left and right.

The conservative right Twitter is called https://parler.com/

And yeah it’s gaining a lot of members recently.

He got a 3rd strike. When twitter temporarily suspended him for 12 hours a few days ago, they explicitly warned him that any subsequent rule-breaking tweets would result in a permanent suspension.

Subsequently, he posted relatively tame, but still rule-breaking tweets, and he got banned for it. No surprises there.

Twitter has done a bad job communicating this.

After the 12 hour ban, Trump's twitter account lost its special privilege too and instead of "blue tagging" his tweets they said they would just ban it next time. This was "next time" so they followed through and banned it:

> Future violations of the Twitter Rules, including our Civic Integrity or Violent Threats policies, will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account.[0]

I'm surprised more people aren't bringing this up. Per them this only needed to violate "Civic Integrity" which per their explanation it looks like it does.

[0] https://twitter.com/twittersafety/status/1346970430062485505

Plus he never did delete the prior three offending tweets as he was supposed to prior to regaining full features of the account during that 12 hour period.

The two quoted tweets are - quite reasonably - being parsed in the context of related social media activity elsewhere, some of which is far more worrying.

I sit here dumbfounded at all of this. People believe that Trump saying he won’t be somewhere is inciting violence. I saw conservatives lose their brain with Obama in 2008 (“ODS”) and I lost faith in “the right”. In 2015-2021 I lost whatever faith I had left in “the left” (“TDS”). Its been over four years of ridiculous takes in the media, including social media, and its not funny any more. Political fanaticism seems to lower IQ by 50 points (and EQ by even more.)

I hope there are people who feel the same way and I wonder where is the best place to get away from the rabidness. Quarantine can’t end soon enough.

Welcome to the political sidelines.

We enjoy bread, circuses and the inevitable collapse of industrial civilization,

You aren’t alone! My family and friends think I am either a closeted right wing racist, or a secret socialist. I have two friends who, like me, question the party dogma and don’t appreciate being nailed to any particular ideology. In my experience in Oregon about 5% of my family and peers are non-partisan but politically interested and informed.

Welcome to the minority!

I find it exceedingly dificult to justify that conclusion based on Twitter's analysis:

President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets (1, 2) by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scavino, that there would be an “orderly transition” on January 20th. The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.

The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.

The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election.

Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.

From TFA.

Yes, it is a stretch. As others have pointed out, there are way better incidences of his rulebreaking than the ones they chose.

This reflects poorly on Twitter.

The actual reason is Jan 20th is pretty close now.

Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms?

As far as I can tell, there are two general viewpoints:

a) Censorship is bad, free speech is good. You should counter bad arguments with better arguments.

b) There are types of speech, which are proven to lead to violence in the long-run. Also, some things can be proven as untrue. Lies are bad.

I have to say, I agree with both of those points. I think group A is missing the point, that there are echo chambers and people radicalizing within their filter-bubbles up to the point of literal terrorism, while group B is missing that the power to censor can be misused by bad actors in the future and that silenced people will not just change their mind.

Is there a proper answer for someone like me? Where should I stand on this? I am leaning towards group A, while acknowledging that radicalization does happen and dearly worrying about perversion of words like "truth" or "fact" ("your/my truth", "alternate facts").

>Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms?

Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted.

It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking.

In terms of the average person? There is no solution for one that is owned by a corporation. An offshoot of the above is the government could make a social media site that is covered under "free speech that the government cannot take away" and anything not blatantly illegal can be posted/said. I would not advocate for this though.. I think we have plenty of options.

But the one for politicians only is something that should be seriously considered.

That's a bad idea, because you are cementing power. It would be hard for contenders to get into office. The incumbents already have a bigger platform they can leverage.

I was also getting at the fact, that Twitter, being a private company or not, basically became infrastructure and was thinking about how it should behave, whether that would be enforced by laws or not.

A highly scaleable free Twitter clone for the entire world run by the US government could be built in a year or two on AWS. If you don't need to build the giant ad network, it's much simpler.

This exists. The government provides the President, the executive departments, and each Senator and Representative with their own websites. They may issue any kind of communications there, including setting up blogs or microblogs.

> Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted.

> It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking.

That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part.

>That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part.

Actually no, the "value" in Twitter for politicians is

* Short succinct messages - people don't want to read a book from their politician for every issue. If it's important and does need more, then they tweet the image of more text or whatever. But most of the time a simple headline does suffice. Otherwise twitter wouldn't be where it is.

* The tweet can be linked from anywhere else on the internet, and everyone "knows" what it should look like and can basically distinguish reality from fake stuff

* Like the above, it's uniform and simple. Someone else commented to me that each politician has access to a website or something. Did anyone else know this? I sure didn't, yet I've seen a billion links to twitter for politicians.

* It would be really sad to learn that politicans are reading replies to their tweets. I don't know how they could get anything else done. Have you ever scanned through a twitter thread from any one of trump's tweets? There is nothing of value, and it's so invaluable that I bet you everyone in the world would be better off with read-only tweets from politicians!

maybe deplatforming politicians (all of them, no matter their role) it's not a bad thing.

there's an entire industry devoted to collect and spread their words, they certainly don't need twitter to be heard.

Politicians aren't the only ones spreading dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories. They also aren't uniformly doing it; what prominent left-wing politicians are doing so? This is just a lazy both-sides position but this isn't something that both sides are guilty of.

aren't we talking about Trump here?

I never said right or left though, I've said all of them, even though from an American point of view I would be described as a "communist" (it wouldn't be far from the truth TBF ...)

I am as far away from Trump as the Star Wars galaxy is from us.

Politicians already have a platform, and the platform is "being a politician"

It's a big leap to go from <Trump gets banned for inviting violence through deliberate misinformation> to <while we're at it, let's ban all politicians because they're similar>. Most politicians have nothing in common with what Trump is being banned for.

Politicians are some of the people most engaged with politics, and I don't think such a large chilling effect fully across the subject of politics would be good for people. There are policies and changes from the status quo that I think are very important to improve society (healthcare for all, addressing climate change) and I don't think removing the most influential voices discussing and pushing these would be good for these kinds of goals, or improve sites like Twitter.

that's not what I've said at all.

Elected officials shouldn't be in social networks not because they are all like Trump, but because they represent the people and don't need to be influencers or to have followers, they serve the people.

if they want to be heard, they can speak with their actions and their messagge will spread on social networks through the people that supports them, the press whose job is to report what they do and official press conferences that have a wide coverage on media outlets.

politicians shouldn't talk "directly to the people" because it's a lie and a distraction, we spend (waste) more time talking about what they tweet and policing what they tweet about than about what they actually do!

they are not common people and shouldn't be treated like they were.

they can have a social network account for their party and for their press office to report on their activities and that would be it.

you would be surprised to know that Angela Merkel has closed her Facebook account with more than 2.5 million folowers.

Also, social network accounts are one of the best way to leak private (or secret) informations.

back to Frau Merkel, her Instagram account (which is actually the official account of Die Bundeskanzlerin) has ben targeted by Russian hackers from day 1 and they've also stolen documens from computers in the German Parliament.

why risk it?

last but not least, social networks are private companies and don't treat users equally, they offer their propaganda platform to some but not to others.

for example Hassan Rhouani, Xi Jinping, Bashar Al-Assad, Kim Jong-un, they are all on Facebook, but not their oppositions and people of those countries are severely limited in the access to social networks or internet in general.

so why give them a global platform? because they can pay?

I say let's ban politicians and solve it.

great powers -> great responsibilities

> You should counter bad arguments with better arguments

We've witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes a level of rationality that has been proven to be unreasonable to assume. The problem isn't that "better" arguments aren't reaching people. Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked).

In that kind of environment, "counter bad arguments with better arguments" is hopelessly naive.

The alternative, which is to prevent the spread of "bad arguments" is dystopian

That's hyperbole. If taken too far, sure. But, if we took our attempt to eliminate murder too far, it'd be equally dystopian. Your statement is not unique to speech.

Murder is quite easy to define, whereas bad speech/bad argument seems so much more nuanced. I don't think it's an hyperbole moreso than the logical consequence of such a thought.

> Murder is quite easy to define

Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter? This is something that people have been debating.

Many actions humans can take could kill another. Only a subset of these are regarded as murder/manslaughter.

Not to mention the fact that our modern definition of murder is based on hundreds of years of trial and error. Is dueling murder? Is killing your slave murder? Is it murder if you get drunk and kill somebody with your car? etc. etc.

>Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter?

It is not murder. There's a concept called "Negligent homicide," but even that is relatively well defined and requires intent to cause harm.

Don't want to get into the rabbit hole, and I am not in agreement with all the laws the US has, but the point is that "bad speech" is way harder to define than murder/homicide. Not only is it harder, it is arguably impossible to attain a good consensus on what it is.

PS: I don't agree with the premise that we should regulate speech, but if you were to want to do it it would most likely backfire or be counterproductive because of these reasons

>Requires intent to cause harm

Does encouraging people not to wear a mask (or just not wearing a mask) in the face of clear evidence and recommendations to the contrary count as intent to cause harm? That is, if I know doing something will cause harm but do it anyway am I engaging in negligent homicide?

That's not hyberbole. The difference is that death is well defined, "bad argument" is not.

The definition of murder is not simply death. In fact, what counts as murder and what type of murder is quite complex and varies by jurisdiction. It was not as simple as saying "no murder". We arrived at this definition of murder over a long period of time.

It's clear to me that our current unprecedented interconnectedness is sending us into a dystopia anyways. 50 more years of this, I simply cannot imagine.

Despite what they show on the news, the situation on Earth is actually improving each year.

Each and every day things are getting better. Do not fear.

Progress is not a straight line, and many things can get better or worse for different subsets of people. This is a generalization that does more harm than good as it minimizes the real trouble people may be facing today or in the near future that they weren’t yesterday.

"The Belcerebon people used to cause great resentment and insecurity among neighboring races by being one of the most enlightened, accomplished, and above all, quiet civilizations in the Galaxy.

As a punishment for this behavior, which was held to be offensively self-righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to anyone within a five mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become."

Douglas Adams, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe

It's how the world worked before Facebook and Twitter (fine).

To pretend that there are arguments that it is not socially acceptable to promote is to pretend that the Overton window doesn't exist. Who does that help? People outside it.

You can't think of any ideas which began well outside of the Overton window, but today are commonly accepted as true?

On the contrary. But it's not reasonable to expect to bring them up without consequences, and specifically in the case of Popper's paradox, those consequences are healthy and those specific ideas should remain unacceptable.

It wasn't when the FCC established standards and it isn't now.

Is it dystopian? There are plenty of bad arguments one could make on this very site which would get your post hidden or removed or even your account banned, and it doesn't feel very dystopian. I wouldn't come here if this site didn't have that kind of filtering and moderation.

> There are plenty of bad arguments one could make on this very site which would get your post hidden or removed or even your account banned

Popularity doesn't imply correctness or legitimacy.

He didn’t say it was popular, he said it was not dystopian

The idea that every possible opinion should be allowed (and that anything else is "dystopian") is quite recent. Have we forgotten about all the alleged communists being persecuted during the cold war? Or people like Bertrand Russel for "sexual deviancy"? Blasphemy laws? Flag burning laws that were common up to ~20 years ago? etc. etc. etc.

There were definitely problems with all of that, but it was hardly dystopian.

Er well I think those are all bad examples -- they all seem pretty dystopian to me, a non-straight atheist with some criticisms of capitalism.

But I think it's a slippery slope to go from seeing that dystopia where some opinions are off-limits to imagining that having any opinions at all be off-limits in polite company makes a dystopia. There's long been norms against stuff like libel, holocaust denial, disregard for human life, etc. Those as norms hardly seem dystopian.

I find constantly being lied to pretty dystopian. There's a significant cost to parsing, filtering, and refuting lies at both the individual and social levels. Perhaps we should consider trying to quantify that.

I find it funny that many people are constantly posting " Twitter censorship bad" on Hackernews, a moderated web site.

It's like the people who describe how utopian things would be without government, but for some reason don't want to move to Somalia.

I'm sure there's some unmoderated site filled with Nazi's high fiving each other you could be posting these thoughts on censorship. I don't belive there's any other kind of unmoderated site.

> I don't belive there's any other kind of unmoderated site.

Moderation of a public space after consensus has been reached long it's members is fine, moderation before dissenting opinions have had their opportunity to be voiced, discussed and their merits disproved through consensus is not. The former is democratic, the latter dystopian.

I don’t think hacker news’ guidelines were assembled via consensus... I believe they were mostly a priori and the community formed around them

It also takes far more time and energy to craft good arguments than bad ones. As the saying goes, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes.

So much this. Drives me up the wall in somewhat scientific discussions, e.g. about climate change. A bogus statement is easily made, but disproving it, if you don't already know the answer, is really hard work - sometimes could take weeks of sincere research, if you want to use proper scientific thoroughness. And of course, there are statements which basically cannot be disproved as they are completely discoupled from reality.

Amen to that. Especially since a very popular tactic is to just bombard you with so much nonsense in rapid succession that it simply becomes impossible to discuss (and research!) each and every point.

And yeah - some of it is so far out there it's not even wrong.

The so-called bullshit asymmetry principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Ideas are edifices, they have to be constructed on a foundation. And, once trusted, they becomem a platform, on top of which more ideas can be constructed.

I think the main problem is that the lies people believe today (i.e. that the election was stolen) are constructed on a deep foundation (which, like anything, is some part factual and some part counterfactual).

To refute a lie, you have to not only tear down the lie, but the foundation on which it was constructed. And because life is complicated, sometimes we construct many verifiable truths on top of complete lies. We have to be careful deconstructing these.

So, to correct a superficial lie (election was stolen), you have to deconstruct the lie recursively (state electors, mail in voting, behavior of senators/congresspeople). This is incredibly hard, because people trust the platforms on which the lie is constructed.

This is why we don't bother trying to reason with the "lizard conspiracy" people. It's also why PhD students can't be bothered to explain their work to people outside their field.

It's a real conundrum.

Doing the right thing is one thing. At times, doing the right thing and expecting it to work out well is where it becomes naïveté.

But that still doesn't make it a fallacious argument.

Sometimes doing the right thing is ineffective. And the aftermath of that crossroads has generally been a place that has not gone well in history.

And what makes you think that forcefully silencing such narratives will make those people change their minds? That strategy is also hopelessly naive.

It probably won't, but it makes it harder for such narratives to reach other people that may otherwise get radicalized.

Nobody is being “forcibly” silenced. They’re still free to exercise their first amendment rights on their own website, in public spaces, friendly private spaces, etc.

What they aren’t is entitled to force a private company to host and promote their content.

Precisely. And that's what people already do when mainstream social media sites won't host their content. Meaning you can't stop misinformation from spreading, not this way. If anything, you're achieving the OPPOSITE effect by turning people who get cancelled into "martyrs".

And by "forcefully", I meant between the walls of the specific media site. (Though good luck explaining the difference to an angry mob.)

You’re missing a big key concept: Trump wasn’t on Twitter because he couldn’t afford a website. He was there because it gave him a much larger audience than would otherwise seek him out. The right-wingers who complain about the terms of service being enforced are doing so because they know they aren’t going to build anywhere near the audience without considerably more work and time.

Reducing the audience of these narratives can help with reducing their impact. I don't think this is a great solution, but not having people locked into alternate realities in the first place does not seem naive.

What's naive is thinking that anyone, once empowered to define impermissible speech, would not eventually expand that definition to include inconvenient speech.

Freedom of speech exists to protect the rights of minorities: the opinions of the majority are tautologically safe to speak. It's unpopular opinions which need protection, and nothing is more unpopular than an inconvenient truth.

Federal courts are already empowered to define impermissible speech, and the worst-case scenario you describe has not happened.

This is a hypothesis in want of evidence.

Federal courts are restrained by the defining document of this country, and by the other branches of government. This is literally the reason why all power is not vested into one branch: to restrain each other from the known corrosive effect of power.

So no, they are not empowered to do this, and they don't have much power (comparatively) to be shielding from free speech in the first place.

They have constraints, but yes, by their judgments they define permissible speech. Consider the Larry Flynn obscenity case.

And what restraints are in place on social media or app platforms when they police speech? Only the ones they place on themselves, so this analogy is broken.

So you're saying, if I understand correctly, that private orgs (not anyone), unconstrained from what constraints they are allowed to apply, will eventually include inconvenient speech.

Probably, but as long as the government isn't putting undue constraints on, the market solves this problem. Parler is right there if a person doesn't like Facebook.

When we didn't ban these people in the 00s and early 10s we didn't get people attacking the Capitol.

Within 3 years of starting serious censorship in most major platforms we have had a near coup.

Sounds like the new system is less effective then blood letting and the only thing that it has going for it is that it makes the people supporting censorship feel better about them selves.

Correlation doesn't imply causation.

Trump wasn't President in the '00s and early '10s either. We didn't have a President advocating sedition to maintain his power. We didn't have a President soft on white supremacy as an acceptable political position.

If anything, I'd call the causation reversed---people using social media to organize violence has the companies in charge questioning their own culpability in violent outcomes.

> Correlation doesn't imply causation.

And it doesn't not imply it.

And did you not pay any attention in the 00s? Bush was a white supremacists and made racism federal policy in airports.

I have no doubt in my mind that if the Charlottesville rally had happened in '02, Bush would not have claimed the are fine people on both sides.

So you're saying that as long as you say the right words you can be as objectively racist as you want?

Like the current VP who did as much as she could to ruin the lives of as many blacks as humanly possible?

I'm saying if you say the right words you don't agitate others to sedition and therefore don't catch a ban.

Trump doesn't know how not to say the quiet part loud.

People getting banned for all sorts of stuff certainly isn't new. Before there were large social media platforms that tried to serve everyone, there were lots of forums ran by random people, and you could get banned for pissing their admins off in any way. Large platforms that are neutral to a fault and super hesitant to ban are only a recent part of the internet, not an immutable fact of the internet.

It also assumes a fairly-sized platform and counter-platform.

Everyone reads Trump's nonsense. There's an exponential dropoff in the count of people who read replies.

In Dutch we have a saying, which roughly translates to "a lunatic can ask more questions than ten philosophers can answer". I feel it's quite apt here too.

How can you tell a lunatic from a philosopher? Am I sounding like a lunatic now? You can refuse to answer, but why stop me from asking?

No one stopped anyone from asking. This wasn’t Trump’s first offense; it was his last.

Not weighing in on this thread, but just for those who haven't heard of the Gish gallop before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

“The effort required to refute bullshit is at least an order of magnitude more than it is to produce it.”

Also most platforms make sure arguments can only even reach people who are already receptive to them. If you disagree with someone you have almost no chance of getting a message to them unless you privately message them.

> Also, some things can be proven as untrue. Lies are bad.

We've also witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes that there is an authority that we can all trust to be objective and not a vested interested that either ignores or skews evidence and narratives one way or the other out of self-interest. Who should be the ones determining what is "true"?

“Who watches the watchmen”

> We've also witnessed the fallacy of this argument.

I'd like to hear some examples.

Do you really think Facebook should be the arbiter of truth? If not, which authority should be choosing which information is not ok?

Rationality is only half the issue. Not only are some people extremely irrational, many people are dishonest and knowingly feed bullshit to the irrational people to use them as an amplifier. That can be used to promulgate a false idea, or simply to steal the time of people in refuting it.

> Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked).

How can you then justify that these people have the right to exercise real power and vote?

> hopelessly naive Yet, it’s the only way to protect their democratic rights and lead them back to a better path.

The fact that people can be mistaken, led astray, propagandized, etc. doesn't contradict the original statement that one _should_ counter bad arguments with better arguments. In fact your argument is falling victim to the is-ought fallacy -- Things are a certain way, therefore they shouldn't be another way.

The fact of the matter is that its true that bad arguments _should_ be fought with better arguments; that's a necessary assumption at the base of any philosophic discourse, and doesn't magically disappear when some section of people are disagreeing with you.

It's ironic that you call the OP naive, as your line of thinking leads directly to censorship, and history can attest to where that leads.

Sind he wasn't being censored and better arguments were presented, factual ones, how come we ended up here anyway?

You argue like Trump been censored for 150 years, when he really wanted to censor those who actually been censored for over 150 years.

So we should all defer to the superior rationality of who exactly?

We could start by not ignoring recommendation/amplification algorithms, especially when they clearly amplify bad arguments and obscure better arguments.

most Americans never lived in a totalitarian state. Totalitarian state starts when the freedom of speech is gone.

It would be a humongous loss to weaken or lose freedom of speech.

As someone who lived in USSR, I am am always on the side of the freedom of speech. Of course I never supported Trump, but I think the consequences of normalizing censorship will be far more damaging then whatever he has to say.

Once you’ve lived in a totalitarian state it is obvious. I hope people who didn’t live in such states would look at the world history and learn.

In Germany you cannot advertise nazism, which you can in America. This restriction of free speech in Germany is exactly put in place to prevent a totalitarian state.

I found it interesting that the last time I was in Berlin, about a year ago, I kept finding the same stickers everywhere being used for vandalism, initially with an anti-fascist message and then just as many cleverly scratched over to change the message to anti-Semitic hate speech.

Equally interesting was that these things were everywhere and none of the locals I was with had ever seen them before. Out of sight, out of mind.

I am not convinced that it helps preventing totalitarian state, quite the contrary.

It's a bad idea to do that. To prevent a totalitarian state, there should be general and abstract rules that prevent advertising things that lead to a totalitarian state.

Having specific restrictions for nazism can have the opposite effect: people think everything is fine because there is no nazism, but other groups, using similar dangerous schemes will not be regarded as dangerous.

De-platforming is not removing freedom of speech.

It is simply one private entity using freedom of speech to say that it will no longer act as an amplifier for another private entity's speech.

Trump can (and likely will) continue to speak freely.

I totally understand that Twitter is a private company which can do whatever they want.

But the world changes and they (and too few others) are becoming de-facto platforms for speech exchange. And this needs to be properly regulated to make sure freedom of speech is not in danger

Freedom of speech is a means, not an end. It's a tool that we can use to shape society as we see fit.

> Does anybody have a solution

Yes. Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement.

It won't solve our current problem, but that's what cause it. They took pg's Fluff Principal and weaponized it.

>Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement.

A reasonable proposition, and it would indeed fix the problem of clickbait/outragebait content. Locally.

People who profit from clickbait/outragebait content would migrate to other platforms that do optimize for engagment, and the cycle begins anew. Thus it doesn't fix the problem globally.

A hybrid solution might be possible if all (or most) service providers agreed to certain baseline restrictions on algorithmic optimization for engagement. Probably unrealistic, because there would be all incentives to cheat any such agreement in subtle ways.

While I don't like various problems associated with it, I support the principle of freedom of speech.

I think to fix this sort of thing, it all comes down to a person's principles. I think we've failed to teach young people about what is right and wrong and why. You can have the government applying blanket control over things to prevent bad actors and disinformation in society. You can also teach people from a young age what is right and wrong so that when they grow up and are in positions to make these decisions, they won't need blanket decree by the government saying "no you can't do this". The topic may come up in a boardroom and everyone ideally would say "what the fuck? That's not a good idea. Let's not do that because it's wrong even if it makes us money".

This is more of a bottom-up approach which can take a few decades to show results. With that argument, I'd be inclined to look back on the last 20-60 years. What have we been teaching/instilling in our population when they were young? I look at the stuff that's happening as a symptom of a long history where we dropped the ball repeatedly.

Agreed, that is a significant cause. However, that must coincide with a updated monetization model for the platforms to account for the inevitable drop in user engagement. This free platforms model is a hot mess.

Leaders convinced people to do terrible things before newsfeed algorithms, seems like it’s only a contributing factor, but not the fundamental issue.

Feels like it’s a ‘mind of humans’ issue.

I'm squarely in group b, however, I don't think it's an actual dichotomy in the way you present it. I think American's fetishize "free speech" which leads to a "hyper group a" that argues since censorship is scary (which it is) we'd rather face any other conceivable consequence rather than wrestle with the hard questions of what is appropriate vs. inappropriate public speech. I believe we're seeing examples of where the pendulum has swung too far, in the US, towards "say what you want" and we need to bump it back a bit. If it swings too far the other way I'll quickly switch my thoughts on the matter.

Also, there's another dimension which I think gets immediately thrown on the floor when these discussions come up. Very rarely are people calling for controls on what can be said at any time. Instead, it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people. Group b folks, such as myself, are not saying that we're concerned about dinner conversations. We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.

> If it swings too far the other way I'll quickly switch my thoughts on the matter.

I’m also in group b, but the danger is that if it swings too far the other way, we may have already lost the ability to speak out against _that_ and restore balance.

Yep, it really feels like people are actively and willingly giving away control and free speech rights to the government and a bunch of corporations. Once the power is in their hands, it will be very difficult if not impossible to get it back.

> We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.

Who gets to pick what is harmful, though? Why can we not choose our own gatekeepers, rather than having them foisted upon us by corporate oligarchs?

The big problem here is that it is completely unreasonable and unprecedented to assume that this will be done in a transparent, consistent, open way. There will be no clear appeals process, and there's no reason to believe that the censorship won't be ideologically biased in favour of whatever is marketing best at the moment.

> it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people

It's controls on what the working class can say to large amounts of people. The elite can still just go buy a newspaper or a broadcast media network, or start their own website, etc. and issue forth opinions on a grand scale. Regular folks will have to go through censors, which will end up being some combination of AI and outsourced farms of moderators in other countries or some other such Kafkaesque nightmare of business process.

> there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.

"harmful" is a social construct, and what is "harmful" to one group might not be to another. Which groups will be prioritized for this? How will you pick sides fairly without imposing a new dimension on whatever underlying group conflicts already exist?

The problem is that what you want to do cannot be done fairly. It can only be done in a draconian way, and the result will be an even wider fracturing of dialogue in a way that doesn't result in what you want, at all.

> I think American's fetishize "free speech"

I find something deeply satisfying about the idea of someone generalizing 333-million people in one comment, using the word "fetishizing" to describe their view of a principle which has generally been regarded as essential to the vast majority of advances in human rights anywhere progress has been made, and while commenting thusly has done so all in the service of making the central point that it is they who overly-value free speech.

> Group b folks, such as myself, are not saying that we're concerned about dinner conversations. We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.

So public speech should be further limited, provided La Résistance is still permitted to speak freely as we enter an era with an ever-increasing number of state-aligned location-aware microphones in homes, workplaces, vehicles, pockets and (on) wrists?

What could possibly go wrong in that scenario?

I am not the person who wrote: > I think American's fetishize "free speech"

But I agree with that statement. "Free speech" is often seen as absolute. But it is not absolute. Not even in the US. It never was. And it should not be. There is always a trade-off.

Limits are (copied from Wiki because I am lazy), for example: "libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury"

For the record, I do not believe free speech is absolute, nor have I since I was taught that it is not absolute as a child. I think every item listed in the passage you cited is difficult and necessary and should exist in some form that comes after much spirited and reasoned debate.

With that said, if you want to see laws have any effect, enforcement is required.

Calls for both an increased number of laws and enforcement of said laws (which is implicit in the assumption that these new laws will have a positive effect on a bad situation) is cause for pause, as, again, that has historically been the means by which states have worked actively against things that many observers would reasonably consider to be essential inputs to securing fundamental human rights.

As an American, I agree. US citizens take the First Amendment as a virtue without a lot of exploration into its origins or practical utility.

It has a LOT of practical utility... But it's really important, I think, to know what that utility is and what its limits are.

And the limits exist and are quite noteworthy. Restricting someone from saying something defamatory is legally challenging relative to, say, the UK. But repeat someone's story verbatim and claim it as your own? Oops, you violated copyright, and no amount of bleating about your First Amendment rights will get you off the hook for the money you owe them, even if you didn't charge for your copy.

I wholly agree with your second two paragraph, but for perhaps different reasons: I find those calling for restrictions on free speech often don't sufficiently understand the nature of existing restrictions and what the implications are of either expanding or adding to said restrictions.

A typical argument pattern is to use free speech as a full stop in any discussion. Engaging with the content of something is rejected straight away, it’s always the principle of the thing.

That’s a tiring argument and describing that as a very American way of fetishising free speech is entirely appropriate.

Free speech is hard. And there are many difficult questions around it where you have to actually engage with the content of something.

So I get why people want to take shortcuts, but that is just so tiring. This unwillingness to even engage with content is extremely tiring.

I'm not sure whether you're saying I'm taking that shortcut in my comment, or the person to whom I replied is likely conditioned by seeing too much of that lazy way of avoiding discussing difficult issues.

I'll assume it's the latter, and say that's very fair. I'll also say, respectfully, it isn't terribly relevant to my observation of someone who made their point by collectivizing an entire nation of people, and did so in a pretty ham-fisted way, while availing themselves of the thing they seek to restrict.

Maybe I just find the complete absence of self-awareness in that comment to be oddly charming.

Personally, as the author, I didn't find myself particularly lacking in self awareness. I did qualify it with "I think" meaning it's a personal interpretation I was sharing. Rather than attacking my character, perhaps you'd like to try and understand why I'd have such a view?

> Personally, as the author, I didn't find myself particularly lacking in self awareness.

That's exactly how a lack of self awareness works.

I missed an /s I guess.

Thanks, I was pretty lost without that.

I also hope my efforts to make it clear it was a commentary on its poetic formulation and potentially a road toward something much worse than the ill which we seek to eliminate, and not an attack on the character of someone I don't know personally (which I try to refrain from doing), were not similarly inscrutable.

That said, I thought it was a point I understand somewhat, however it was made. I just disagree with it.

There's a very simple line to draw. You police actions, not speech. Someone talks about building bombs? Fine. Talk never blew anything up. Someone builds bombs? Time to arrest them. It's not very complicated.

People are responsible for their own actions. "But he incited me to violence!" is not an excuse for violence. Maybe in the case of a superior giving a subordinate a direct order (in which case both are responsible), but "the man on Twitter told me to do it" should hold about as much sway as Son of Sam's "the neighbor's dog told me to do it".

This is too naive. Should a 9-year-old black girl be forced to endure racial epithets yelled at her as she enters her school on a daily basis because free speech is so sacrosanct it outweighs the abuse? Obviously not. The truth is in the gray -- free speech isn't an absolute.

Screaming in someone's face is an action, not speech. Should the person be stopped from expressing the same sentiment by writing a letter to the editor or posting it on their blog?

Even if someone is saying something supportive to you, you would probably prefer they don't scream it in your face.

Posting a statement to a Twitter account that people are free to follow, ignore, or block at their will is not even remotely comparable to physically forcing yourself into their presence to yell at them.

These hypothetical statements are just garbage. Demeaning other humans is wrong and nothing about it is “free.” The abused pays for that speech with their own identity.

Now, how we determine demeaning language and what the punishment/cost is for using it is a worthwhile discussion. We _already_ have a system for when someone’s _character_ is attacked publicly: libel/slander.

Libel and slander would actually be a good model!

1. Requires actual damages. The speech cost you money or demonstrably harmed you in some way. No, "you hurt my feelings" or "I paid with my identity" doesn't count.

2. Both parties have an opportunity to plead their case to a neutral adjudicator. The proceedings are generally public record and there is a process for appeals. The rules governing the system (laws) are public record and citizens have a say in electing the representatives who write those rules.

3. The speech must be not only demonstrably false, but intended to be believed and also be something that reasonable person could possibly believe. Opinions generally do not meet the level of libel or slander.

Yeah, that's not bad. Compare that to Twitter's system where an opaque set of rules are applied inconsistently by an unaccountable party with no appeal process.

That subtle jab at my opinion in the first example is a nice touch (/s) and the rest of your reply completely contradicts the point that demeaning someone is wrong. We need to better tackle punishing misuse of speech as a society.

If you can think back to a time when you have been verbally abused, use that as a model. For some folks, this happens routinely on Twitter and real life (usually for minorities in a group). Nobody said Twitter’s framework is the correct system, but suggesting that demeaning someone is “free speech” has me scratching my head.

Demeaning someone is free speech. It is speech. People are not obligated to like you. They're not even obligated to have a good reason to dislike you. They're allowed to say that they don't like you for whatever stupid reason they have. That's freedom for you. The alternative is worse.

Suggesting the alternative is worse is a straw man.

I can’t say certain things and that’s totally fine. Disliking someone doesn’t mean that demeaning them is necessary. It’s already not legal in the workplace in the US when it is prolonged or severe.[0]

The alternative already exists today and is being applied unevenly globally.[1] I brought up examples of free speech exceptions already. I believe demeaning someone should also be an exception, and yes today that isn’t an exception in the US. Perhaps we need very precise definitions for these concepts to avoid over application, but hate “words” and the like are easy first passes.

0: https://www.eeoc.gov/harassment

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

That's not what strawman means.

Harassment is not illegal in the criminal sense. It is a cause you can sue people for. That also means it requires evidence and convincing a judge and possibly a jury. Again, there is a due process. It's not at the whim of a corporation. It also requires real damages such as a negative impact to someone's career, not just hurt feelings.

That's the case with all of the exceptions to free speech: there is a tangible, real world impact such as loss of income or risk of physical harm. "Feeling demeaned" is none of those things and is something that anyone can claim about anything. How you feel about something is also a choice. You can choose whether or not to let speech affect you like that.

Free speech always requires qualifications: to foster a tolerant society you can't tolerate intolerance. Where the balance is, is hard to determine. Will Trump's supporters follow him to a new social network? Will more active moderation stem disinformation and restore civil, good-faith discourse? I don't know if platforms taking a more active role in shaping online discourse will be successful, but I know that it's essential to our society that we keep experimenting to find that balance.

I like to think about these issues as "website moderation policies" because that's all it boils down to. Almost all sites have moderation and for good reason. Besides all the spam and trolls good moderation helps build a community. That's why we're all here, and also why I'm selective about what subreddits I join.

If a company is so powerful that their moderation policies are effectively censorship, then there is definitely a serious free speech concern. The solution is to break up the monopoly so that no one company is that powerful.

Break-up doesn't stop collusion

Regardless of any principles one may hold, how could banning Trump from Twitter achieve anything positive?

They're forcing Trump to join some more right-wing friendly site. Those are way more saturated with conspiracy stuff. In effect, Twitter is inadvertently exposing his audience to way more false information, achieving the exact opposite of what is ostensibly the goal here.

Extremists will view it as positive because it reinforces one of their chief rallying cries. It will been welcomed by many as an acceleration towards violent civil unrest.

I'm more interested, for now, on the platform issue itself. Barring blatantly illegal stuff, when and why should a platform like this (especially like this) itself enforce its self-made policies and act as a censor?

If it's an open vox populi platform, and if something isn't illegal (as in quotable in law), why should a platform have its own police? Leave it to, err, police? Of course, that opens up a question of whose police and laws if the platform is global... However, my point is, if the platform is non-moderated, why censor on your own?

Their argument is that it is borderline illegal since it could be perceived as incitement to violence given past events.

The other thing is that we need to recognize that the law allows for immoral, unethical and antisocial action. "Not illegal" is an incredibly low bar, and we shouldn't necessarily strive to have the legal system get involved with community morals.

I put myself in the camp of 'free speech is good, with the singular exception of intolerance.'

But it's pretty complicated. Defining intolerance, eliminating bots, etc. Not an easy task.

For (b), why should individual companies and platforms do anything but follow the law? Many countries have laws against inciting hate speech. Others, including established democracies, have laws against sedition and such which would address this. Wouldn't someone bring a legal action based on such laws and thus end such behaviour via the proper channels, such as the Courts?

Imagine there exists a perfect AI, that can tag all tweets as “true, somewhat true, somewhat false, false”, I think it would be in the public interest to allow all tweets, but tag them accordingly.

We have laws against defamation, slander, incitement of violence; but no laws against lies. And I don’t think we should.

There are not two legitimate viewpoints. There is one, and many very smart people have spent a lot of time and resources figuring it out. Just like practically everything else in existence being something in the middle, it was decided that free speech is good with exceptions (your “b”, as it were). Language influences people, literally and figuratively. The mere act of knowing a different language changes how our brain works. So it’s not a stretch to understand and acknowledge that speech is powerful and can cause bad things to happen just as sure as if you did them yourself.

Either a) (US way) or b) (EU way) are fine, but the problem is when they’re applied unfairly - supporting Antifa riots is treated as a), supporting right-wing riots is treated as b).

So you are effectively argueing for a).

in response to (a). I think too much censorship is bad, but there is some amount of censorship in every country in the world.

We do censor speech in the USA. IMO we could go a little further without being at all "Orwellian".

Many countries with very high levels of freedom from government intervention and freedom to vote and express themselves (mostly in Europe) have much stricter views on what constitutes speech that should be censored around hate speech and overly nationalistic speech.

FWIW, while many of those countries take a stricter stance on hate speech, most of them also have a much _less_ strict stance than the USA on other forms of free expression, like nudity and swear words.

> Is there a proper answer for someone like me?

Honestly, I don't think there is one. The problem with A is that it will lead to violence, anarchy, or brutal dictatorship if left completely unchecked and certain groups start to counter (verbal) arguments with death threats and violence.

There is a school of thought that says that a free society has to accept this and basically live with the fact that it's constantly in danger due to this.

But even this school of thought has one fatal flaw - its proponents lacked the information that we have now. Social media enabled psychological mechanisms that prior to its inception and widespread use were really hard to trigger.

In the 20th century, mobilising the masses was hard work and required a lot of resources (printing was expensive, organising large rallies to reach many people was expensive and dangerous, ...)

Today, everybody can - even without owning a smartphone or a computer or having internet access - reach literally billions via social media (e.g. by using an internet café). A single Facebook post or Whatsapp message can lead to riots and mobs that kill people [1].

These are means of communications and psychological effects that are simply unprecedented in human history. We opened Pandora's Box without even realising it.

When the US constitution was written, no one had social media in mind when they wrote about free speech. The very concept that a single man could within the blink of an eye spread their message to half of mankind, unchecked, without any immediate consequences, completely anonymously was just unthinkable.

The amplifying effect of digital echo chambers that suppress dissenting thought and nip constructive discourse in the bud, was yet unknown. FOMO and social media addiction didn't even enter the scientific community until just five or so years ago.

It's a really complex and difficult problem and I would love to see some constructive discussion about what to do with it (especially in the mainstream media) - preferably without reducing it to an unfruitful us-vs-them.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/21/how-misin...

We have no right to Twitter's platform. Maybe if the US made a messaging platform we could complain about government censorship on there.

My understanding is that censorship is currently the only known way to tackle untruths leading to violence on a platform that enable viral sharing of information.

In any other instance, censorship should be (is?) inconstitutional.

I think everyone is ignoring the nitroglycerin that's been poured onto what was originally just embers. Every single one of these social media platforms has had an enormous incentive to broadcast viral mind destroying rage-bait to everyone 24/7 for the past decade.

People say that free speech needs to go, but free speech has been working fine for centuries, and allowed formerly incredibly unpopular opinions to take hold, opinions that we now take for granted. There's also plenty of historical precedent for horrible shit promptly happening right after it gets removed.

The solution is not to ban wrongthinkers, or get rid of free speech. The solution is to build our civilizations communication systems in such a way that they incentivize actually productive discussion, rather than this.

This seems like a paradox since broadcasting viral mind destroying rage-bait is... free speech. So what you're suggesting seems like it necessarily involves curtailing free speech.

Sure, free market, when someone communicates in manner that does damage to it that company will deal with it.

I believe the classical meaning of "free speech" as it pertain to government, democracy, and as has roots in Ancient Greece is great. The government shouldn't be able to restrict the flow of ideas or persecute people for them.

I also believe that same meaning of "free speech", that binding of the government, can't also be applied to private citizens and entities. That's a paradox; you inhibit their free speech by trying to force them to be a party to others speech.

I believe in very, very narrow exceptions to the above in the vein of what we currently have.

I also believe private citizens and entities being able to decide collectively on what is and isn't acceptable and not giving quarter to what they deem as bad actors is.. Both good and a type of free speech. It's not perfect, and we don't always agree with it, but it seems that over time we've been living in more and more liberal, socially, times while government has become EVEN MORE tied on the subject of free speech(Larry Flint? etc).

I believe it's also okay, even though I don't necessarily agree, to think we should do nothing within the public to restrict or discount others speech and opinions. But then, I'm also betting on society working that out on its own based on the above :)

(c) the policies of private companies that are not subject to public utility-like regulation never amount to censorship in a way that is worth wringing one's hands over.

News papers have published letters from readers for many years.

They've had editorial standards. I don't know if this is much different -- it's faster for sure, but crazy people haven't always had a huge platform.

In fact, it's seems reasonable to let people say whatever they want so long as the audience is small. And I wonder isn't that pretty much how it works today?

I doubt Twitter would ban my account, if I tried to incite my 5 followers to stage a coup :D

If you seem to serious about it, you should be more worried about the FBI & Secret Service than Twitter

The next step, I think is to ask yourself: if the problem cannot be solved, which world do you want to live in: the one where (a)'s downside comes true or (b)'s? I'd rather (a)'s.

Group A fails to address the fact that emotionally loaded speech severely dulls the rationality of most listeners.

Group B requires someone to take a stand on what the different types of speech are, how we recognize them, and how each should be handled, and also what the threshold of proof for untrue statements should be.

I think group A is ideal as long as the speech holds a certain level of rationality, but that limitation sort of moves it into group B since it's now subjective.

I think it boils down to: If we are unable to agree on even the simplest rules for our discourse there's no way to prevent the discourse from collapsing.

> You should counter bad arguments with better arguments.

When the people making those arguments, and the people consuming them, are not interested in "better" or even "factual", then this is an exercise in pointlessness.

People are motivated to disseminate and believe in things which fit their worldview, and they will continue to do so regardless of little things like counter-arguments or even provable facts that outright contradict their fantasies. They will continue to disseminate things they know to be false as it fits their narrative.

The marketplace of ideas is a failure in the age of social media.

History has shown that censorship leads to violence in the long-run.

We will see violence almost immediately.

The criminal justice system has very fierce teeth to address B.

Inciting violence and conspiracy are both crimes.

This is an attempt to intervene on a different level and I’m unsure why exactly we feel the FBI, DOJ, Secret Service, etc. aren’t up to this task.

I think there is too much equating free speech with consequence free speech. What we are seeing recently is (mostly) consequence free speech. The trump camp has been able to make blatantly false claims without any accountability (mostly, there are some threats and actual defamation lawsuits now). The bar needs to be relatively high, but I think there needs to be more consequences, especially for public officials, in spreading blatantly false information.

We already have this in some places anyways, like courts. Why can’t we apply this more stringently for government officials?

I will say the real challenge with true free speech is the people who abuse the meaning of it compound that with people who make money on viewership. They have no incentive to tell the truth since they make money on getting the most attention. It really leads down a disheartening future where truth doesn't matter but viewership volume does.

I'd like to think most people take the quality of their content (i.e. truth and thought) as important to how they consume. All data currently points to the latter in terms of quality of content. I am concerned for the world my children and my children's children will be raised in if this trajectory keeps going.

> Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms?

the still sitting president of the USA could open a channel in telegramm (no censorship at all right now), or he could use a russian service like livejournal or vkontakte (they wouldn't have a case to ban him), but I guess that's all he could do right now.

Update: he can no longer use parler, that has been removed from both app store and google play. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/parler-removed-fro...

it seems like banning platforms wholesale is the logical next step; so usage of alternative platforms might not be a solution.

As your link says, it has been removed from the Google Play store but not the App Store.

the title "...Apple App Store suspension reportedly looms". Some paranoid souls might be suspecting some level of coordination here.

Hold platforms accountable for the radicals they create.

Imagine how different the world would be if Facebook faced consequences for the genocide it helped facilitate in Myanmar.

These companies will only ever respond to a loss of revenue, which is why you are seeing these bans now instead of 5 years ago.

Twitter helped create this mess, and now people have died and our country was a few guards and a chair barricade away from an actual coup.

this

Here’s the solution, lost in noise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263815

The constitutional scholar perspective: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/28/trump-is-...

A platform is demonstrably different than speech in real-world terms. It is simply not possible to 'say' something while you are sitting on the toilet to 70 million people within a few seconds.

The idea that 'a platform' and 'speech' must be treated the same is ultimately a kind of class warfare -- its a false comparison that serves to benefit the rich (in this case, rich in terms of platform reach) by pretending that any attempts to place restrictions on the use of mega-platforms must necessarily imply new restrictions on the speech of the vast majority of people without such reach.

A is demonstrably and blatantly dangerous approach for society. Thus we must consider option B, and due to all risks associated with that, we must be damn sure that the institutions responsible for managing the discussion are and will stay accountable and transparent towards the public. Are we there? Hell no.

I think it’s called up/down voting.

Maybe chill out about deplatfoming? Any one can put up a website for about $10 with whatever text on they want and if twitter.com or facebook.com chose not to have the text of your choice go to another site.

Comparing today's media, to the media of old - where they colluded to hide FDR couldn't walk because of the shame/and attacks it'd lead to now, where Tech companies overtook print media and now themselves control the pitchforks and direct anger at the masses.

1984 Two minutes of hate is real, so very real, and it's quite sad how most people welcomed this into the world.

I've deleted my social media, twitters years before, and have divested myself completely from other platforms. There is nothing to be valued, gained or such,

The Internet should always be a decentralized, fragmented piece of human technology. The more centralized it becomes, the more authoritarian it is. And the orgs that become in control point the finger at others to show off how it's not them.

I hold no opinion on Trump, but these tech companies have to much power and it's a game of bidding where they can creep more and more into our lives and general lobbying to make the case that life is "better" with them here then it ever was before.

I can't say if it really is.

Trump gave Twitter the power though, so I don’t think his suspension supports your logic. He was the user who communicates only over Twitter, purposefully de-fragmenting it. He could e easily protected himself from this by publishing the same content across many different platforms.

The tech giants only have power when users give it to them. Trump could’ve negated their power very easily, without legislation.

You might enjoy this take on the matter:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YtRfmao1vvs

>I hold no opinion on Trump,

Everyone has an opinion about Trump. Are you too afraid to say yours? I'm asking in good faith here - not trolling.

>I hold no opinion on Trump

Utterly baffling and genuinely inconceivable. My imagination is running wild trying to imagine what sort of person you might be, assuming you are being honest here.

IS it wrong to always be skeptical and paranoid about the world, the media, the government, the tech companies/any company promising a good thing?

This isn't a new feeling, idea or such - there's always been a counter culture and I enjoy and love tech. I never got into Twitter, and the more accessible tech has become, it seems to have become eternal summer.

Which, on one hand is good - tech is accessible, government "can" be more transparent then ever.

But is it, really? Go back to any presidency generation and you can see the same questions. It doesn't matter if it's the red scare, the pacifist of USA not jumping into WW2 until bommbed at pearl harbor (but had operations in Sino China.) and etc -

That's another issue here, the moving and adaption of wrong think, and tribes forming based if you think one alike - there's so many arguments from how you value money, what is money, what is a good president, if the color of your skin matter, what you do, how you spend your free time, if you allow people to peer onto your social presence, etc

It's just alarming, the slippery slope of internet adaption/culture the past decade really has ushered a dystopia.

But, it seems, according to you, that is "utterly baffling and genuinely inconceivable" where it goes to show, if you don't follow tribe mentality, you are labelled pariah, and then what, excommunicated for questioning the status quo?

It is specifically baffling to have no opinion on Donald Trump, yes, and that is precisely orthogonal to one's opinions on the internet, Twitter, "tribes", technology, or anything that you mentioned in your comment, for that matter.

Put away your pitch fork for a second and think rationally what the chilling effect of this is. It doesn't matter who the president is, what matters is that this is unprecedented that a tech company, that skims the line of being a media company which is usually the mouthpiece/marketing arm for corporations to outsource their engagement has this much control, manipulation and can steer an audience / rewrite an narrative as it seems fit.

Then throw in any politician, and there you go. Can be trunp w/ Twitter. Can be how Facebook abetted genocide Myanmar -- yet you are focused on "what" I think.

That's how deep you are in the rabbit hole, and how deep the user audience for these walled gardens are.

I understand it's hard to separate recent events from the big picture - but that's what it is all about. But it seems no one else sees that.

I don't even have a pitchfork, I was just genuinely surprised by the prospect of someone having no opinion on Donald Trump. That has literally nothing to do with technology whatsoever, if we were cavemen and Donald Trump was a caveman and you said you had no opinion of him, I would still be baffled.

There are people who live in countries outside the US, you know.

Even then it's next to impossible to not have an opinion on Trump.

It's impossible to not have an opinion about something you know about.

One can tell themselves that they don't have an opinion, however I don't think that it's true.

If you don't care about something, then that's your opinion.

You have an extremely obnoxious, narrow view of the world then, like some child whose yet to develop a Theory of Mind and forgivably fails a false-belief exercise.[0] I suspect you're offended the opinions you're emotionally invested in have apparently been trivialised.

My 90-year-old frail Bangladeshi grandmother cared as much about Trump as she did about Bolsonaro—i.e. not at all. She cared very much about politics domestic to her country though, her husband was a politician.

What is your opinion on the Nigerian Special Anti-Robbery Squad—an important political topic in a country of 200 million people? Or the debate on traditional vs simplified Chinese characters? Or Article 9 of the Japanese constitution? These are things people are very emotionally invested in, are these topics also impossible to not have an opinion on?

Some people have other things to think about.

0. https://s3.amazonaws.com/spectrumnews-web-assets/uploads/ima...

Your 90 year old frail grandmother is also not here writing essays about U.S. presidential history. I also find it difficult to believe someone so knowledgeable about such a subject has no opinion whatsoever on Donald Trump

As someone who lives outside the US I can assure you that very few people in my country don’t have an opinion on Trump.

Yeah, I agree. I've started reducing the amount of social media I assume and deleting certain people off my networks. Way too much vile behavior on social media and it is a net negative to my life. I suggest others to do the same.

Social media is the cigarette of our generation.

This has been an embarrassing incident to those in power because it made them look weak. But calling a populist movement with millions of supporters, terrorists is very short sighted. It will only accelerate the fire.

The left soon will control all three branches of government, after an election that many people question, has been simultaneously advocating for censorship of its political adversaries, more draconian civil rights removals under the guise of COVID. The inevitably resulting destruction of more people's livelihoods will create more desperate people. I hope you realize where this is all going. Because its obvious more people will be revolting if this continues, and will organize to resist. Censorship and oppression is not the answer. Letting people voice their grievances, is the last peaceful outlet before actual violence.

What part of attempting to block a Constitutionally mandated process through the use of force is not a terrorist act?

It seems like a criminal act.

But didn't BLM demonstrate that political violence is effective at achieving your political goals? Or is it justified when it's your side committing the terrorism?

Remind me again of which political goals associated with BLM have been achieved.

>>political goals associated with BLM have been achieved.

Perhaps financing the successful Democrat campaign by laundering BLM donations through the ActBlue portal? I don't think all the reports for the last election cycle are in yet. If not that, at least capturing data about progressive donators who could be solicited for contributions...?

Brittanica:

"Terrorism, the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective"

Not seeing it. They were going to bring about a general climate of fear in the population to prevent something that was happening that day?

Do you really think that if they had had brown skin instead of white we would be having this conversation at all?

A good bar might be the definition of terrorism in the United States, which includes:

> ... acts dangerous to human life ... [intending] ... to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion ...

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2331

Here's the full definition that you cherry picked from:

(1) the term “international terrorism” means activities that— (A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;

B) appear to be intended— (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

So, under that criminal code that you quoted, were the actions on Capitol Hill international terrorism?

What's the line between a protest and terrorism?

As far as I can tell based on the 24 hour news cycle it's whether you personally agree with the protestors/terrorists.

Showing up to the Capitol with zipties, presumably to take elected officials hostage, qualifies as terrorism. Eyewitnesses reported specific threats made against the Vice President, and some carried nooses with them into the building.

Zero elected officials were actually taken hostage. You saw a picture of a guy with zipties at the capital, and extrapolated all the way to the rest of your comment.

Antifa showed up at several state capitals with much worse than zipties. They firebombed Federal buildings and police districts. Chanted for the removal of elected officials. Constructed guillotines.

Do you call them terrorists?

More importantly, how many elected Democrats have been signing the praises of antifa rioters all summer, telling us we need to leave room for them to express their rage, that we are supposed to be uncomfortable, that property violence isn’t violence....

And now they’ve gotten exactly what they’ve been asking for the last 4 years, Trump’s account suspended.

Just because they failed doesn’t mean they didn’t seriously try. A woman was shot in the neck and died because she climbed through a barricade towards men with guns pointed at her, telling her to stay back. What was her goal? To get to the senate floor that was still being evacuated. You don’t want to call it terrorism even though the entire legislative head was nearly at the mercy of a mob?

Actually the FBI said today they are still investigating if anyone actually tried at all to take hostages, and still investigating who the person was with the zipties and what they were doing there.

The woman who was shot (elsewhere I posted the very graphic video of it happening) was surrounded on both sides of the door by police.

My best guess is she was fully enthralled in a mob mentality and obviously not thinking clearly. Violent mobs are dangerous for this exact reason. We saw this play out again and again over the summer, and a lot of people died.

From the video I saw there was no need to kill her, she was trying to gain access to a long hallway with a half dozen police in the far side of the door, and the snot fired could have very easily hit the police officer that was standing right by her on her side of the door at the time.

I think all we can do is purely speculate on her mental state and her goals.

There will be a lot of evidence if she actually went to the capital in order to hurt or capture public officials. None has yet to be shown. All we know basically is that she was a military vet.

I agree with you. I think there is something wrong with the way we are reacting to these people and it's ratcheting up every day. I personally think they are deplorable and retrograde and, above all, willfully ignorant. But there is something wrong with this entire system and the path forward feels as untenable as the path we've been on.

There has to be a detente, but I would never suggest that amongst my orbit of people. The language of the moment is so loaded, I'd probably be called a bootlicker. At the same time I had friends calling for the gunning down of these people as they overran the Capitol.

It's very hard to reconcile all of this turmoil.

You have two sides in ideological conflict that are fundamentally unwilling to let the other deescalate.

With neither being allowed to back down, either conflict or subjugation at a national scale are inevitable.

I feel that we have a very short window left to rectify this sentiment lest we be in a completely failed state. Sadly becaue of COVID, it's very difficult to move countries at the moment. I do not plan on sticking around to see what happens though.

Had we known each other, I'd have been one of those friends who might have said "gun them all down".

But ... to whatever extent I really meant that (and I really don't know what that extent is, though I do know that the sight of the confederate flag inside the US Capitol made my blood boil) ... I didn't do that. I didn't order anyone to do that. I didn't encourage anyone to do that. I didn't even go on social media and suggest it.

Meanwhile, while I was feeling whatever I was feeling, two pipe bombs were carried into the Capitol building. Windows were smashed, offices ramsacked, and there may (just may for now) have been much more serious intent on the part of some of those who got in (reports about plans to abduct various members of congress, not sufficiently confirmed yet).

So please, let's stop with the whataboutisms and the both-sides-do-it nonsense. Yes, there's blame for most things in this country to be distributed across both political parties. But equating some of our angry, privately voiced feelings about a violent attack on the US Capitol with ... a violent attack on the US Capitol ... just seems nonsensical to me.

There is no whataboutism coming from me. You are welcome to point out where I've advocated for such a thing.

For the last four years there has been a constant refrain that we need "adults in the room". Right now more than ever, we do. For some people the chickens are coming home to roost and I'm just saying -- we -- and by "we" I mean reasonable people -- should avoid our worst tendencies in this moment, even privately.

There are adults in the room. I'm not sure why you can't see that.

Sure, they may be adults who are also bought and paid for by powerful and rich interests, but the adults are here and have been all along.

Two clarifications without further comment.

The pipe bombs were left at the RNC and DNC headquarters, not inside the capitol building.

I have not heard any reports of plans to abduct members of Congress being audibly discussed during the riot. Someone in paramilitary gear with a handful of heavy-duty zip ties was photographed in the senate chamber though, and there have been reports of the mob chanting “hang pence.” A gallows was erected outside the building.

I had an initial reaction along the lines of "Why didn't they use more force"(to put it mildly), but after the initial reaction and reflecting on it more I believe the officers on the scene did admirably given the circumstances and the overwhelming numbers they were dealing with.

We try to do things different in the west; we don't just massacre protesters or even rioters if we can help it. That's always how it goes, but that is how we try to do it, isn't it? The only thing that mattered, and the officers primary mission, was securing the members of congress and the VP. After that it was human life.

I agree. I'm left leaning and if I read Reddit I see the same hateful arguments that people on the other side of the political spectrum use. The words may differ but the arguments are the same.

> The left soon will control all three branches of government

...the supreme court is majority conservative and has 3 trump appointees. Senate and congress are together one branch (the legislative branch).

The court which Democrats have promised to pack?

Ruled out repeatedly by multiple individuals who would need to sign on. Whoever you heard that from was either misled or trying to mislead you. Biden is one of the staunchest institutionalists in government today.

Which Democrats? Biden has expressed enormous reluctance to this idea, if not outright opposition, and if it was even close to happening anyway (which is unlikely), it won't happen without his vote.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/policy-2020...

Biden famously has refused to rule it out despite being asked repeatedly since winning the nomination.

I can't find any references anywhere to anyone asking him about it since he won the election. Before the nomination, his answers where classically institutionalist. After the nomination, he refused to be specific and said I'll let you know after the election". That doesn't appear to have happened.

I said after winning the nomination. It was very big news at the time.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/08/politics/joe-biden-supreme-co...

I addressed both time periods.

The opening of your just-cited link reads:

>Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden again ducked questions Thursday about whether he would seek to add seats to the Supreme Court, telling reporters he would not address the issue until after the November 3 election.

For me personally, when I combine that with his institutionalist remarks before he became the front-runner in the D primary, leads me to believe that he's not in favor of it, but tried to hedge once he won the nomination to avoid another irritation to progressives.

I do understand that your interpretation may be different.

I hope you’re right!

You brought facts to an emotion fight.

Sigh. Sadly, I'm well aware that one cannot combat irrationality with reason. However the purpose of my post was more to inform readers who might be unaware of the structure of US government that it was an untrue statement.

True; on the other hand, the Supreme Court didn't even deign to hear the Trump election challenges, so I think it's fair to wonder if they are really on the side of MAGA-style conservatives.

Time will tell if the courts prove to be an obstacle to the Biden admin, but I'll predict probably not (& that will be in contrast to the Trump admin).

There's a vast gap between not going along with baseless and unprecedented attempts to overturn a democratic election, and being left-wing.

Not if you've been socialized by 4chan and Zucc's algorithms

Well, it's hardly unprecedented; Gore v Bush anyone?

And in general election fraud, complaining about election fraud, and occasionally even doing something about it have a long history in the US.

Per polls, something like 20% of democrats believe there was a significant amount of fraud.

Democracy doesn't work if a majority of the people don't think the process is fair.

If there are allegations of tomfoolery, then let them be argued in court. If they are groundless, great; many people will recognize that and you will increase confidence in the results.

By dismissing purely on procedural grounds, you weaken the democratic system.

> By dismissing purely on procedural grounds, you weaken the democratic system.

You don't seem to understand how the justice system works. Courts can't just decide to investigate whatever they want to investigate, if there is no standing to hear a case then there is no case to be heard.

Also there were some fraud claims that were dismissed on the merits (because they were utterly baseless) so it's not true that they were all dismissed on procedural grounds.

> Bush v. Gore

The Bush v. Gore lawsuit was about how to deal with ambiguously marked ballots (remember the hanging chads). No insane Chavez/Dominion/dead voter/whatever election fraud conspiracy theories involved.

Nothing was stopping the Supreme Court from hearing the (e.g.) Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit; it's up to the court itself to decide standing (which also isn't even a legislative concept, but that doesn't matter either way).

I agree there were a ton of crazy claims and people flying around (e.g., Lin Wood, either crazy or a scammer or some combination of both), but not all claims were on the face of it crazy.

As a practical matter, if you want your democracy to function well, you need most people to have confidence in the election process; I think you do this by (1) allowing free discussion of claims of fraud in public forums and (2) allowing interrogation of serious claims in court, so everyone can see arguments & counterarguments put forward, and also feel that they've been given a fair shot at legal remedy.

To a large extent (1) was supressed (on e.g. youtube and twitter), and (2) mostly did not happen.

Now we're seeing massive purges on social media of Trump-supporting accounts, which is again, not a good way to increase people's faith in the results of the election.

> Bush v. Gore

Not that meaningful of a difference between contesting votes based on hanging chads vs. poor signature matches, imo.

> (which also isn't even a legislative concept)

What do "legislative" concepts have to do with the judiciary? You're just throwing around random jargon you don't understand.

> but not all claims were on the face of it crazy.

All the fraud claims were crazy. Every single one of them.

> allowing interrogation of serious claims in court

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a single plaintiff with standing (i.e. Trump or another candidate who allegedly lost a race due to fraud) ever litigated a voter fraud claim in court. Do you know why? Because no serious government lawyer is willing to destroy their reputation by litigating obviously frivolous claims. All the fraud claims were litigated by 3rd party cranks with no standing, hence their dismissal on "procedural grounds". The only lawsuits initiated by Trump or other candidates directly were procedural ones (e.g. complaining about whether or not certain deadlines were changed legally), NOT fraud related. If no one with standing wants to put their reputation on the line to litigate nonsense fraud claims then it is not the fault of the courts that the fraud claims cannot be properly evaluated.

> Nothing was stopping the Supreme Court from hearing the (e.g.) Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit; it's up to the court itself to decide standing

Yes there was, it's called federalism. Texas doesn't get a say in how Pennsylvania holds its elections. Texas v. Pennsylvania also had absolutely nothing to do with fraud. Texas was just complaining about changes PA made to PA state election laws. And again, the SCOTUS response was, correctly, "fuck off, state's rights".

> If they are groundless, great; many people will recognize that and you will increase confidence in the results.

This is extraordinarily naive. There is no evidence of fraud and every single non-brainwashed person is already aware of that. The ONLY reason why so many people believe fraud happened is because Donald Trump says so, and a large fraction of the population treat him as an infallible cult leader. It doesn't matter how many cases the courts rule on and how thoroughly everything crank theory is investigated. The Trump cult will just claim the courts are controlled by the deep state pedophiles.

I don't know if there was fraud or not, and haven't investigated deeply, but I thought there was at least a reasonable case from this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nuMe7DDnpY&t=3s

and from reading parts of the Texas lawsuit.

Roughly half the nation supported Trump; from polling, it's somewhere around 25%-50% of the population that thinks there was fraud. It's not reasonable to just write all of those people off as crazy cult members.

If you want a healthy, democratic society, you need to engage concerns with good faith.

How'd that quote go, that was so popular last summer?

Oh, right --

"Riots are the language of the unheard."

it's really sad that you've reached the point of cynicism where the court putting legal and democratic principles over partisanship is so inconceivable that you think they're sympathetic to the other side.

I agree wholeheartedly with your assertion that "calling a populist movement with millions of supporters, terrorists is very short sighted".

I do, though, flinch at your use of language when you refer in the second paragraph to "the left", as if it is some rigidly defined thing or set of attitudes. That seems to me like a set-up for binary politics; an us or them thing.

My active involvement with political things has always been issue-based, often to do with local affairs - roads, planning, preservation or redevelopment of areas/historic buildings. These things have never been, at local level, "left or right", and I have found such labels, especially when applied before the subjects have been discussed/examined, to be unhelpful.

FWIW, I prefer issues to be debated on merit, rather than their labelling broadly as left or right, and this is largely because of experience of such debates at the local level - where it really does matter to people.

edited for a typo - correcting "beenn" to "beem". More may follow.

> after an election that many people question

Many people also think the earth is flat. It doesn’t mean there’s any merit to the claim. Countless election officials, judges and government officials, both left and right-leaning alike have unequivocally stated that there was no fraud. This group includes Trump’s own attorney general. Biden was elected democratically.

I don’t know if you saw coverage of what happened yesterday, but it already got violent. These people went beyond “voicing their grievances” and broke the law.

And I don’t see anyone calling everyone who voted for Trump a terrorist. They’re calling those who broke into the Capitol in order to use fear to change the results of an election, terrorists. The fact that you’re equating Trump voters with that mob is on you.

100% this. People here fail to realize that there was some nutter on Christmas who suicide bombed himself over 5g conspiracy theories. Where was the FBI to stop this guy? No one where to be found.

I hate to be the one to say this but political motivated violence will be on the rise sharply.

are you trying to equate the preparedness of law enforcement to prevent in advance a single mentally ill person's non-publicized surprise attack to the very publicized and clearly anticipated actions of thousands who widely published their intent in advanced?

I'm with you on likely more violence, yeah I also think probably from those considered 'left' tooe

but the better comparison between both events is that they both involve insane conspiracy theories bought into by a very specific slice of mostly white, mostly male, mostly MAGA and Q folks.

If you step out just a tiny bit of of the US political context, you might realize that you can hardly call the democrats "The left". From an European perspective, you have the extreme right, and the right. I think this statement might be true from a South American perspective as well and likely from others.

> Censorship and oppression is not the answer

Trying to overturn election is oppression. Literally, there is nothing more authoritarian going on right now then that.

Donald Trump and other republican politicians spread lies about election in an attempt to overturn election in any way possible. They tried and failed dozens of lawsuits to overturn that election. Trump trying to bully Georgia Officers to find votes for him.

And somehow, those lies being spread among their fans and their party proves that ... democrats should not have won the election.

Election means that your party can loose. And your party then can try to convince people that they are better party. But you loosing election and then not being able to accept that your party should be ruling everything or that it was rejected by large groups of people does not mean you should get some concessions.

Just because you are throwing anti-democratic tempper tamptrum does not mean you have entitlement.

> But calling a populist movement with millions of supporters, terrorists is very short sighted. It will only accelerate the fire.

Whether they are terrorist depends on what tactic they use. Not on how many supporters they have.

74 million voters. This is not going to play out well. There's really no coming back from this moment, the technocratic elite have changed American democracy forever. Edit: I mean this in the way Snowden tweeted yesterday, it will be interesting how this plays out for better or worse, but it is a monumental policy shift that will be a date marked in history books.

American democracy was changed long before this. (see: southern strategy, freeing of slaves, allowing women the vote...)

I doubt it’s as big as you say. Watch interviews with normal Trump voters (ie, not the meme-lords and q nuts), and they have expressed a pretty high degree of frustration with his Twitter habit for most of his presidency. Given how long Twitter has put up with the obvious abuse of the latitude they uniquely gave him, a lot of people may be grumpy but will understand. Had they done this years ago and NOT given him such exceptional latitude, then you’d probably have seen much larger blowback.

Additionally, even those who voted for him likely voted _against_ the other candidate rather than _for_ Pres Trump. His approval ratings have never been high, and are lower at this point in his term than any other recent President except Pres Carter.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

45% of Republicans support the actions at the capitol https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

You say this like its the first time Americans have had to learn to live with having lost a federal election. Half the country is disappointed every four years. Starting to make concessions to terrorists because they got really upset after being lied to repeatedly makes no sense.

There is a difference between disappointed and storming a goverment building to stop the offical event required to make it offical. That difference is a lot of anger. Honestly, I don't think America has seen this before. Not even with the war of independence, that was kind of difference since it was about not getting a vote and not that the vote didn't matter.

What are you suggesting by "the vote didn't matter?" Just because they might believe Trump's lies about the most recent election doesn't mean their emotions are justified.

> What are you suggesting by "the vote didn't matter?" Just because they might believe Trump's lies about the most recent election doesn't mean their emotions are justified.

I believe, they believe the election was rigged. Justified or not, it doesn't stop them from doing stuff.

Isn't the remedy to that to show them less of the guy who's been lying to them? How will allowing him to continue lying and myth building avoid further violence?

You could also have investigated voter fraud. You know, the whole reason why they came there to protest in the first place. That's an option. You will likely dismiss it because you've been told that there is no voter fraud, but dismissing something doesn't actually address it. Nothing about the objections brought up when states like Pennsylvania were being reviewed was actually addressed by the so-called winning side.

I wonder why Kris Kobach keeps coming home empty handed from his fishing trips

1) Why would it be necessary to investigate where there has been no evidence to show that an investigation is even warranted? Where does the line get drawn?

2) Even if they did investigate it clearly wouldn't work. These conspiracies are self sealing - lack of proof is itself proof. If you're capable of rigging an entire election, then of course you will be able to do it without leaving any evidence.

There is nothing to investigate. Did you read any of the affidavits filed with the so-called "fraud" lawsuits? There were election observers complaining that they saw lots of military ballots for Biden, which is proof of fraud because they "knew" military members were "supposed" to vote for Trump. There was another observer who complained that he saw an Asian person working the polls, which was proof that the CCP had infiltrated the elections. The lawsuits were just hundreds and hundreds of pages of conspiratorial nonsense like that. The lawyers filing these things are QAnon cultists.

How do you "investigate" allegations like that? If you've really fallen for this scam then you have been thoroughly brainwashed by the far right internet.

Everyone came forward with whatever they thought was suspicious, but we're at the point now where things that even sound like "voter fraud claim" are automatically dismissed.

Take for example, this: https://mapthefraud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DATASCIENC/pag....

If the thousands of votes here were fraudulent, the quantity is sufficiently high to assume that some organization is trying to interfere with the election. If there is an organization capable of creating thousands of fraudulent votes in this instance, then what instances are we unaware of that the same organization is also involved with.

I'm not asking for a 2-year investigation based on allegations of a pee pee video recorded in a Russian hotel, I'm just asking for:

"Republicans opposing Wednesday's electoral count have one proposal to deal with the controversy — that Congress delay action for 10 days so an "emergency" electoral commission can audit the results and investigate voter fraud claims in the contested states."

https://www.npr.org/sections/congress-electoral-college-tall...

Spurious speculation does not qualify as evidence under the burden of proof you would need to delay a Constitutionally mandated certification. You're explicitly calling for throwing away the Constitutional process.

They had 2 months to litigate those claims, why do they need 10 more days? After 10 days are they going to invent more nonsense claims and then insist they need more time? Delay the inauguration indefinitely?

> Take for example, this:

More crank garbage. The voting histories of every voter are public domain, if you think there are more votes than voters why are you trying to scrape some random web portal through questionable methods instead of checking the voting records directly?

If this allegation were really credible can you point me to a lawsuit filed by an by a plaintiff with standing (e.g. Trump or another Michigan candidate who allegedly had the election stolen from them, NOT some 3rd party QAnon crank) that presents this allegation to a court? If no such lawsuit exists why do you think that is the case? Maybe because no competent lawyer wants to destroy their reputation by arguing obviously fake conspiracy theories in front of a judge?

The people that lived through the American Revolution would strongly disagree with you that the current situation is worse.

I didn't say it was worse or better, just that it's not the same.

There was a little matter of the Civil War that might deserve some of your attention.

> I don't think America has seen this before

I think that says more about how boring & peaceful the late twentieth century was. The number of people old enough to remember more interesting times is declining quickly.

As a sidenote, this is probably why our Covid response has been so awful. We have no real living memory of a collective calamity.

Half of the Union literally seceded because it didn't like the winner of the 1860 presidential election.

That...is a pretty revisionist take on the civil war. More popular is the opinion that the south wanted to perpetuate chattel slavery for economic gain, masquerading beneath ‘states rights’.

I mean, damn, there’s a reason Buchanan is said to have caused the war—and it’s not that he just happened to have been president before Lincoln.

I didn't mean to imply slavery wasn't the motivator - but the trigger was the election of a (moderate-ish) anti-slavery president from an anti-slavery party, who explicitly called for the end of admitting new slave states to the Union. Secessions all happened between Lincoln's election and his inauguration, and the declarations of causes almost all cited Lincoln's election as proof of Northern anti-slavery intent.

Similarly, the refusal to accept Trump's loss is rooted in deep gulfs on identity and to a lesser extent on issues. I don't think you can separate the end-of-the-world paranoia from attitudes on BLM, for example.

All the rally goers are not terrorists anymore than everyone who was at a BLM protest is Antifa.

We’ve got to be very careful here not to paint all of MAGA with that brush because that ends in a dark, dark place.

The oligarchs are laughing in the background as the divide and conquer strategy is working quite well.

So many servile people ready to give up liberties here because they want to punish the other, refusing to understand the implications of how such systems will be turned on them some point in the future.

All? No. But some? Hell yes!

Even when ‘leftists’ protest at congress, they go through metal detectors and demonstrate peacefully—no window smashing, no theft, no overrunning security lines. Trumpists on Wednesday literally hung nooses from trees and killed a cop.

Wisconsin says hi!

Also not like 5 congressmen were shot of anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_sho...

The issue is the right feels underrepresented in the MSM, so they move on to alternative media which are echo chambers, which leads to things like these riots, and the response from the left creates further segregation and more echo chambers. Both sides remain confident they are completely, 100% in the right, because each is living in their own universe. This feedback loop has been going on for a while now and right now it's just going crazy.

> which are echo chambers

I mean, let's be honest here. There is a lot of good journalism in MSM; just about everything reported on from leaks and "anonymous" sources leading up to the Mueller report was later confirmed in the report or by first-hand witnesses(the matter-of-fact stuff, not necessarily the conclusions). Buutttt... CNN still has their "outrage" segments and echo chambers..

You’re almost close at the end there. The echo chamber of the MSM is worse because it has an air of legitimacy afforded by a history of journalism that doesn’t exist anymore. Once great institutions like NYT and NPR are scant more than propaganda arms for the left’s authoritarian communist regime. And you guys don’t realize you’re part of the echo. IMO the left is no different from us, we’re all trying to navigate this strange post truth world.

Neither accepts that it’s not just the other side distorting reality; both are oblivious to their own distortion.

> the left’s authoritarian communist regime

> you guys don’t realize you’re part of the echo

> we’re all trying to navigate this strange post truth world

I see what you did there, do you?

Hopefully you see what you did there as well.

Makes sense to me in the context of an assault on speech. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> authoritarian communist regime

Breitbart is leaking.

But honestly, care to elaborate? I'm genuinely curious.

NPR? I think that at a certain point you might realize that it would be worth taking a step back and reevaluating your information diet. When you accuse NPR of being a propaganda arm for the left's "authoritarian communist regime" is probably about that time. Way past it, in fact.

I'm really not sure where the whole communist thing came from, anyway. Go to the far left of the Democratic Party and you are still pretty far to the right of communists.

If you think that NPR is close to a balanced outlet, I'd venture you're unfortunately the one off. I wouldn't call them communist for sure, but more times than I can count they've shocked me with partisan or incorrect reporting.

What is your idea of a balanced outlet, then?

None! I wouldn't claim any outlet is. Read from many sources, from all over the spectrum, build a model of each ones moral foundations, find reporters who seem to be in it for good reasons and model them. There's no bastions of reliable news, just you vs a stochastic void of political claptrap, your only hope is to Thompson Sample the widest set of half-popular sources for nourishment.

This is related to another point that's been floating around in my head for a while. The amount of effort involved in just trying to get a balanced view of our political situation is insane, and few people are willing to spend that much energy. But even though few see the whole picture, most have very strongly held political opinions. This naturally tends towards echo chambers which is obviously really bad if you're in a democracy which vitally depends on everyone being well informed.

I think this is mainly because we set the wrong incentives, for example outrage drives clicks which drives ad money, though we can also throw evolution some shade for lacking foresight when it made outrage such a strong emotion and gave us a tendency towards reaffirming our own views.

In any case, I don't know how to solve it, and it's certainly not a new problem (I guess it's been a thing since democracy is a thing), but it seems the web amplified it a lot, to the point where I think it's to blame for our current political division.

> authoritarian communist regime

That's where you completely lost me. Yet another person who doesn't know what communism is and just uses it as a blanket, non-sense label for leftists.

Literally the biggest cable news channel in America represents their views 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. What in the world are you even going on about?

This is countering my point how?

RWNJ media is the MSM

My surprise that this acronym is even a thing aside, do you actually buy this?

Even if you do, the right pretty obviously doesn't agree, and you don't have to look far for evidence. If they wouldn't feel like they're represented unfairly in the MSM, they wouldn't keep complaining about fake news and the MSM in general.

Talk radio and the Murdoch empire are a large part of the MSM.

You have basically just repeated your previous point.

Maybe the solution is to use 21st century tools for democracy in 21st century. Issue based open voting, flexible mechanism of vote delegation, and ability to trade votes to reach compromise can fix what social media have broken https://voteflux.org

There have been closer elections in recent history. Why are you giving this particular one such outsized proportion?

You didn't see this sort of reaction in 2000, and that was far far closer.

And to be clear, this election was 306 to 232. That is considered a landslide in my book (meaning my 40+ years of living). And in percentages, you can see just how poorly Trump performed in this election - 51.4% to 46.9%. 2000 was 47.9% to 48.4% (technically a negative 0.5% difference).

So I think your argument is completely disingenuous.

> Why are you giving this particular one such outsized proportion?

> You didn't see this sort of reaction in 2000

I think you found the reason? When exactly have we seen such a reaction before?

Maybe you could actually say something, instead of expecting us to guess...

When have we seen the loser's followers violently storm the Capitol to stop the certification of the election's votes? Never in the US.

This isn’t about closeness at all. It’s about ~half the country actually believing that the election was rigged. That doesn’t have precedent as far as I know.

That's too bad. They're wrong. And using violence is not the answer.

To be fair, the other half of the country believed that the previous election was thrown by Russian interference.

And to be really fair, half of the country believed neither of those things. There are plenty of people who voted for Trump who believe that he lost fair and square, and ditto Hillary voters in the previous election.

It's been interesting to watch Trump signs vanish a few at a time with each post-election milestone. Most people seem to accept the results even if their lines are different.

> It’s about ~half the country actually believing that the election was rigged.

I think it's more accurate to say that a percentage of people believe they will benefit by repeating claims that the election was rigged.

It's difficult to truly believe that an election was rigged, by the other side, when your side was ultimately responsible for its administration.

Half the country doesn't believe that. Source?

My bad, should’ve done the research.

In a mid December CBS news poll, “82% of Trump voters say they do not consider Mr. Biden[‘s win] legitimate.” The vast majority of trump voters isn’t the same thing as half the country.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-most-feel-electio...

I think it's telling though that the one question that's very narrowly scoped in interpretation(in that first batch about who won etc), the question about what should happen if the electoral college votes for Joe Biden, has 51% of Trump voters saying that Trump should concede.

Seems like most voters were still holding out while there was some hope of a viable legal route to contest the election. But a majority of Trump voters, at the time of the poll anyway, made a clean break from contesting the election after the electoral college vote.

> You didn't see this sort of reaction in 2000, and that was far far closer.

Just a comment on this point, I see two huge differences:

1) Gore conceded. On 13-Dec 2000. Trump only just "conceded", and still called it rigged, stolen etc. It makes a big difference when the leader concedes.

2) Technology has totally change the landscape in the last 20 years. There are now plenty of spaces on the Internet, huge echo chambers, allowing people to share posts and fuel each others hatred, spread misinformation, organise and mobilise.

How how the times change. Gore conceded. Then withdrew it. Then later conceded again. Up until 2000, it was pretty unprecedented. Some rather spicy events.

2020 obviously blew it all out of the water though.

> the technocratic elite have changed American democracy forever

You keep blaming tech companies for the poor actions of the adults using it and it doesn't make sense.

> the technocratic elite have changed American democracy forever

The president has spent weeks trying to delegitimize the results of a democratic election, culminating yesterday by inciting a mob to de-rail the ratifying of the results, but it’s the banning of said president from a social media site that has changed American democracy forever. Right.

In a book about how the Trump era changed democracy, this would merit a paragraph or two at most.

It appears to me that there is a huge electorate that is disgruntled and has felt that the people in power have ignored it for too long. If such a large number of people have actually vandalized Congress (didn't they do something like this to the Michigan Statehouse) to make their displeasure known, then they must genuinely feel that the normal method of registering protest, i.e., voting, has ceased to function for them. The overall smug and condescending tone of the mainstream and social media barons and the professional class only exacerbates this feeling.

How many of us here has had to face years of despair because of job loss, and loss of social standing due to globalization and corporate greed? Do we have any genuine hope (and more importantly, need) of understanding this 74 million?

How do you suggest we do that without disrespecting the far greater number of Americans who voted in good faith in a free and fair election for Joe Biden? Democracy makes losers of us all once in a while, we need to learn to live with it.

It's obvious that most of the people who voted for the losing side did not show up at the protest. An even smaller fraction breached the Capitol Building.

It's interesting that you say that Biden voters feel disrespected because Trump voters protested something in the way they did. When BLM protesters vandalized (mostly poor or middle-class people's) shops, do you think it was reasonable for non-BLM people (most Trump supporters) to be outraged? If not, therein lies the problem.

BTW, there were violent riots when Trump was elected president, including in Oakland, Portland etc.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Oakland_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Portland,_Oregon_riots

Perhaps I should rephrase, what are the specific policy goals you would like to see that could be pursued to help restore faith in the electoral process?

I think if there is a move to radically improve the transparency of voting no matter the method, it would restore confidence in the electoral process. Vote by mail was the main culprit, and it is easier to game voting by mail than in-person voting. So people have valid grounds to doubt the validity of elections, particularly because margins were thin (as they almost always are, but they arouse much greater suspicion when an unprecedented number are voting by mail). That is a process that each state needs to undertake, which is easier said than done. As with the covid response and vaccine administration, federalism shows its structural deficiencies again.

How is voting by mail "easier to game"? You just seem to be repeating talking points. I don't think you have any actual solutions, because you don't have any actual issues identified.

Judging by the overall tone of your comments, you don't have any actual intent of engaging in any sort of discussion. I will try nevertheless.

Mail dumping, interception and modification of ballots, just plain errors in ballots or failure to mail them (these last two are not in the 'game the ballot' category, but they do happen with mail-in balloting) all occur in almost every election. Even if they do not materially change election results, they affect the perception of the legitimacy of results. The perception is as important as the reality of the process. Any law that helps improve the perception should be welcomed.

> Mail dumping, interception and modification of ballots, just plain errors in ballots or failure to mail them

Did any of this actually happen?

> ...they do not materially change election results...

So... what’s the problem again?

These deficiencies have a clear cause: Donald J. Trump.

I would bet Federal bureaucracy would have hampered say a Clinton response, but Trump refused to lead, take even the most basic federal action, and he basically doesn't care beyond testing numbers affecting his election. He specifically withheld supplies and support to D states until 'they have to treat us well' e.g. be a sycophant on tv.

Maybe voters would have confidence in mail-in-voting if Republicans & Trump didn't spend a year attacking it and spreading politically motivated lies.

VBM is secure and many studies have shown there is very very little fraud.

My state Colorado has been sending ballots to almost every voter for years and it works. A Republican SOS helped craft and refine the system.

used by like something 94% of our voters, clearly trusted and used widely on both sides. Notice it doesn't get attacked by legitimate Republicans here

https://www.5280.com/2020/05/no-fraud-isnt-rampant-in-colora...

I used Vote By Mail myself and I also agree various studies and articles that say that fraud doesn't materially affect elections. But why shouldn't steps be taken to improve VBM transparency and voting transparency overall to restore confidence in the process regardless of method? "Works", "Works Transparently", "Works Verifiably" are all different degrees of transparency that imply different levels of confidence, right?

What are some steps to make it more transparent? That critically both protect secret ballot and not suppress the vote?

Republicans have been ruthlessly effective here and there are plenty of laws that are passed under the guise of 'anti-fraud' but really are to suppress the vote usually in favor of southern Republicans. Copy of license, very very restrictive rules on who can request a ballot, reducing drop off locations etc Same playbook for a century, different rules

> non-BLM people

I strongly suggest you stop and think for a bit about what this means.

This refers to people who chose not to protest on the streets. Not sure what you're taking exception to here.

I chose not to protest on the streets but I would still consider myself a BLM person

Those 74 million people were quick to taunt the other side for being disappointed in losing the 2016 election, they like to wave flags that say 'fuck your feelings' as some weird badge of pride. Why again are we supposed to be understanding of them? Perhaps they are, in fact, just jerks and it's okay to say so.

Was that before or after many high-level Democrats and Celebrities denounced Trump and committed to resistance on Nov 3, 2015.

4+ years of no-quarter given raging against Trump has set the tone for the future of America. I don't think anyone is going to like that future.

So it was only in 2016 that the opposition party decided to drag their feet in any way possible? Not 2010? And it was only in 2016 that the tone was set for America, not when the current sitting president was raging for years about how the previous president was not a real American citizen?

Grab a mirror. This has been building for a lot longer than 4 years.

If the Left didn't want the Right to be mean to them maybe they shouldn't have called them nazis and deplorables.

Pretending Obama wasn't born in America is pretty deplorable

Ruining a teenager's life because he smiled as someone screamed in his face was pretty deplorable. We could do this all day but his point is that Americans have to grow up and start respecting each other.

I'm always struck by how fast the rhetoric shifts when one side loses a big election. How quickly we care about everyone being civil, and respecting one another, when we are no longer holding the position of power.

I find this comment interesting simply because it's the exact opposite of my FB feed. People there accuse leftists of calling for civility now that they have won, when they haven't been civil until this moment (their words, not mine)

I guess that's the beauty (maybe not quite the right word...) of two large groups of people attacking each other. The odds are good that if you look, you will find someone on the other side saying exactly what you want to record them saying.

A majority of registered Republicans have told pollsters they believe Obama wasn't born in this country many times since at least 2012. How many Democrats care about the outrage incident you cite, using empirical evidence?

Out of curiosity what event are you refering to?

I can step in: Covington High School student

Bearing symbols that represent the depression of Jews in Germany, symbols that have been banned there, is being Nazi.

I think both sides have a problem with assuming everyone on the other side fits a single mold. Apparently that mold fitting the more radical elements of the other side.

Actually, one of the magical things Trump did was prey on a lot of individuals individual desires while getting them to ignore all the stuff he promised to others that they don't agree with.

But anyway, just because you voted for somebody doesn't mean you agree with them on everything. That's as true for the left as it is the right.

So you're basically saying that we should behave like them and wave 'fuck your feelings' flags as well.

> understanding this 74 million

You believe you have no hope of understanding nearly half of all voters? You think 74 million people all think the same?

The 74 million are mostly conservatives. I don't think they are all the same, but as a group they do have at least a few defining issues that they agree on?

Sure, but don't believe that as American's there are a few defining issues they agree on along with just about everyone else in the country? Don't you think there are many things they don't agree on?

Heck, GOP got jack-all done in the first two years because they apparently don't agree all that much.

>It appears to me that there is a huge electorate that is disgruntled and has felt that the people in power have ignored it for too long

They literally had 4 years of their president sitting in the oval office, during 2 of which they controlled the legislature as well. If they felt ignored by the people in power, then it was THEIR people that THEY elected that were ignoring them. And, apparently they were not dissatisfied with them because they by and large voted for them AGAIN in 2020.

>then they must genuinely feel that the normal method of registering protest, i.e., voting, has ceased to function for them

No, let's just call them what they are: sore losers.

You've been using the site primarily for political battle and breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. We ban accounts that do those things, and have asked you several times in the past to stop, so I've banned this account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Trump is the one who chose twitter. No position on the planet has more choices to spread a message to an audience than the POTUS. Twitter owes Trump nothing. He broke their rules and faces the consequences. One politician being banned on social media sites is not a sign of the technocracy subverting democracy; it’s a sign that no one is above consequences of their own actions.

Curious, do you think all 74 million people are actually outraged? A lot of people voted republican because of libertarian views, not because they support Trump specifically. A lot of them also don't believe the election was rigged. The capitol riots that occurred this week have also swayed more people away from the conservative party. Trump still has millions of supporters but I think that number is tricking down given the recent events.

Polling shows ~50% of Rs say that it was rigged. So not all, but that’s a big number.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/half-of...

Okay, let's retroactively suspend John McCain for singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran" on a hot mike.

President George W. Bush should be suspended for invading Iraq on false or flimsy pretexts, resulting in 6,000 American soldiers killed and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Obama lied when he said "you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan" eleven times and this turned out not to be true (90% anyway). Shouldn't the social networks censor patently false and misleading statements by a very influential leader?

Ronald Reagan said something about launching the nukes on the USSR, I don't remember the exact quote. Cancel him off social media.

Et cetera.

</parody>

The harm in censorship is that it actually reduces the flow of communication and information, for future historical records as well as for the present.

That’s not censorship (private companies, etc), and reducing the flow of harmful communication is a good thing.

Censorship can be performed by private companies. From Wikipedia:

“Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.”

It would be censorship to _force_ a company to say something they didn't want to say. That is clearly taking away their rights to free speech.

Are you being purposefully obtuse, or do you actually believe that HN wrote your comment?

I don't think you understand. Read it again. But sigh. I could explain it again.

Disallowing companies from banning users would be forcing those companies to carry content they disagree with, thereby removing their right to free speech.

Your stance is effectively that social media sites are publishers instead of platforms. This is my opinion as well, but it carries with it liability. Unfortunately, they currently are immune to such liability while being able to choose who can say what.

If they want the protections the phone company gets, they need to act more like the phone company.

It's not really. You can disagree with something but still not be responsible for it and carry it on your properties. You can also disagree with it and not carry it.

I can even prove it.

That's how it works. Right. Now.

Control. Trump is not controlled by Twitter. He is controlled by the government just like the rest of the US. A school, they control the children, and they have a limited control over the child's free speech. Your job, possibly a private institution, has control over you. They can censor you with the power they have.

We need the 1A because we don't get to choose our government, we do get to choose our internet messaging platforms and they choose to work with us.

It is the very definition of censorship.

And one man's "harmful communication" is another woman's useful communication.

Since your comment is egregiously wrong and, in my opinion, harmful, I'm going to delete it so that it doesn't mislead people about the harms of censorship.

See where I'm going with this?

I say my opinion, you present your side, and we can debate, or move on, but we have both had our say (albeit, at varying shades of grey on HackerNews ;)

The notion of "harmful tweets" is a very 2020s phenomenon but the concept goes back thousands of years. There's a reason our Bill of Rights is strongly inspired by Voltaire, Descartes, and other (then) modern thinkers.

"I disagree with what you say, but I will give my life for your right to say it."

It feels as though we've backslid from that ideal.

I want to agree with your argument. But your point that this is censorship is so off base. By definition, it's just not.

By whose definition?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/whodecides/definitions...

It’s pretty simple, really.

“I hate Bob” is fine.

“Bob should die” isn’t.

Some tweets don’t need to exist because it might lead Bob to be killed, especially when said by someone with a cult-like following.

"Bob should die" should be allowed to exist and is. It can be said jokingly, yes it's bad taste but not credible.

"Bob, I am coming to kill you" or "Bob I'll kill you if you don't do X for me" a court would say is probably a credible threat, which is already illegal.

Why do we want to shift the responsibility of deciding how to police speech to private companies?

Sticks & stones.

Jokes aren’t included.

However some jokes already are illegal or at the very least will get you in trouble, for example there’s one word you can’t joke about in airports.

My point was credible threatening speech is already illegal in America.

Another point would be who decides what is or isn't a joke or hateful?

Do you want the companies to decide what the correct speech is, would you like a government panel to police speech?

Currently, I like illegal speech being the only rule because it gets murky otherwise.

> My point was credible threatening speech is already illegal in America.

So we agree. Trump’s tweets were pretty credible, don’t you think?

This whole mess this week happened because of one person who incited violence.

We do not agree. There was nothing credibly threatening in his tweets.

This whole mess happened because of the instigating of the media and the riots all year.

This event did not appear out of nowhere, there was major tension building and there still is.

If this were your platform and its T&C explicitely said that harmful content is not allowed, in my opinion it’d perfectly fine that you delete a comment you deem harmful.

> "I disagree with what you say, but I will give my life for your right to say it."

FYI none of the people you cited ever said that. This is a 1906 quote by Evelyn Beatrice Hall that has been misattributed to Voltaire.

If Gutenberg could've been pressured in to restricting what combinations of words were allowed in his press, the enlightenment ultimately may never have happened. Simple as that.

The problem is today's printing presses are not owned by the people who use them, and can be confiscated without warning or recourse.

The consequence will be the end of liberal society, but society will demand it.

Gutenberg is one example, Hitler another one.

It like people already forgot that followers of the president committed an domestic terror attack right after attending his rally.

According to some reporters who were there, people were already in the Capitol Building _during_ the rally and that there was a steady flood of people heading there before the rally finished.

The capitol was clearly barred+fenced off. They FORCED their way in. All of it was televised. Why even try resort to fringe observations by "some reporters".

There is plenty of video of them being let in. They took down the barricades and just started letting people in. This camera person for a news outlet just walked right in with 0 force.

https://twitter.com/insidernews/status/1347646782659031043

Because at that point they are heavily outnumbered that point they couldn't do much besides securing the MVPs (Senators, personal etc.).

Here is the video where the terrorists crushed an officer to death: https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1347749675777011714

The doors were definitely not open at the beginning, which everyone who watched it live clearly saw.

What he did see is a violent mob who forced their way into the building and a police which was outnumbered and not prepared.

> The capitol was clearly barred+fenced off. They FORCED their way in.

Neither of these facts are in dispute by anything that I said.

All I was saying was that it did not start after the rally, but during.

Then whats the point of you comment if not to sugarcoat the fact that Trump's followers committed an act of terror.

Doesn't matter that some may have been there earlier. The vast majority went there after the rally. And of them a significant portion conducted or threatened violent actions against the capitol, police, politicians, and the free press.

Really? How many were killed by the terrorists?

It appears that (at least) one person died by the hands of them.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/08/politics/capitol-police-o...

Also, a terror attack doesn't need to kill people.

This will lead to more violent unrest -- it will be seen as more "proof" that Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Gov are aligned against them.

Crazies on /pol/ and elsewhere use the term acceleration to celebrate actions by either side that move society closer to violence. This move by twitter will be welcomed by them.

True, but frankly I'm tired of appeasing these people and listening to their constant threats of extortion. If they decide to step across the threshold then we can stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and deal with it as a straight conflict of interest.

If trespassing is domestic terrorism, we might as well just tear up the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The death of freedom of speech is ushered in with thunderous applause.

It's true. Nazis didn't come to power with boos and jeers. The baddies always come to power with thunderous applause and it's pretty much all that's been going on today over deplatforming one side of the political spectrum.

QAnon, Neonazis, Donnie and his fellow grifters, &tc are not a “side of the political spectrum.” God help us if they are.

There are still plenty of conservatives around. If Twitter isn’t enough for you, you’ll find them also on the nation’s most popular broadcast channel, Fox.

And they can make their own damn platform. It’s a free country, and that includes the freedom of private business to tell them to go away.

Ummm maybe I'm mistaken but censorship was widespread throughout Europe during the enlightenment and yet the enlightenment still happened. The paranoid American style where anything but free speech in the most absolute and extreme terms is guaranteed to result in tyranny and the destruction of civilisation itself isn't really born out by any of the facts.

You forgot Kamala Harris, who encouraged the extremely violent and destructive BLM riots that killed more than 25 people and caused over $2 billion in property damage. That didn't seem to get Twitter's attention. She even set up a bail fund for the terrorists who participated in those riots.

Do you a single fact to back that up? I don’t even like Kamala but I don’t think she set up a bail fund for the police, though she has called herself “America’s top cop” so it wouldn’t surprise me.

Kamala Harris and several others in the Biden campaign tweeted support for a bail fund; I don't think she herself set up a bail fund but my knowledge about this is limited.

1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/man-accused-of-rapin...

BLM protests were mostly non-violent.

https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...

A small percentage of a large number is still a sizable number.

Flying on 9/11/2001 was "mostly safe" because less than 96% of flights were hijacked. Also a true statement, but ridiculous.

The BLM riots resulted in 19 dead, and thousands of properties damaged. It's equivalently true to say "Trump protests/rallies are mostly non-violent", since the majority of them (probably rivalling the 96% in the article you mention) have had few issues with violence until the recent insurrection. But that would just be a vacuous talking point.

None of those things were said/done over social media—I could be wrong about Obama here. All of those statements and actions were covered by the media because they were newsworthy.

Some of Trump’s tweets are also newsworthy, of course. But the format of direct communication without context to millions of followers is a big part of how he was able to spread and maintain such a false view of reality.

Before, any statement from a president was reported on, and usually presented with additional context that includes fact-checking where possible, by a broad range of left- and right-leaning news outfits. That’s no guarantee that batshit-crazy lies don’t get through, as we saw with Iraq WMDs. But it generally provides better safeguards. Trump can still call a press conference, or even put out videos from the White House, any time he wants to. It is not a hardship. I’d argue that he liked Twitter precisely because he controlled the information, and could rely on people to take him at his word.

I realize that I’m painting kind of a rosy picture here, since so many trump followers already hate and distrust the media. But presidents got by without Twitter before trump and if it came down to it, whitehouse.gov is just as easy to check for new statements that aren’t edited by the MSM. And I think this is too little, too late from Twitter as well—they never should have made a separate set of rules for him. I don’t think your “future historical records” holds water here, since every tweet he’s made is already archived elsewhere, unless you were getting at something different.

As a similar thought exercise to yours, if in the administration’s view the election was stolen, that surely counts as a national emergency, which qualifies the president to “tweet” whatever he wants over the emergency broadcast system. There are plenty of other avenues he can use.

"What, you think we should be filing our nails? Okay then, let's just cut our arms off."

It's a purge, had just read 5 minutes ago that they had suspended Michael Flynn's account, now I'm seeing that FB has decided to ban a community of over half a million people [1] supposedly because their political opinions are not in the best interest of FB the company right at this moment. Of course, I had to get all that info from thedonald.win because almost no-one else is talking about this. Coincidentally, I also think thedonald.win is only hours away from having their domain name taken from under them. This is crazy, crazy stuff.

If it matters I'm not an American citizen, have never set foot in the US (even though it's a country I admire in many ways, just right now I'm reading a selection of Anti-Federalist papers in order to try and understand it better), have grown up as a kid in Ceausescu's one-party state Romania and I have to tell you that this doesn't look good.

[1] https://twitter.com/BrandonStraka/status/1347592064322719744

As an American, I will tell you the tweet author you quote is not a reliable narrator.

There are lots of non-reliable narrators on FB and Twitter (I ironically liked a witch's Suggested Page on FB just two days ago), that's no valid reason to ban them.

I wasn't suggesting that user should be banned; but that a quick glance at his profile and feed can tell me he lies a lot, and if he's your lens into America, you will not be seeing reality.

> Of course, I had to get all that info from thedonald.win because almost no-one else is talking about this.

Except on the news media [1], or the largest politics community on one of the largest social networks on the Internet [2].

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-bans-michael-...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ktcafe/twitter_ba...

There's a bot (https://twitter.com/TrumpsAlert) which was intended to track Trump unfollows and it appears around 6% of ~500 people Rudy Giuliani follows had their accounts suspended today. I was surprised to see Ben Garrison on that list since I'm old enough to remember when the left liked his cartoons. It's like that scene where Catelyn Stark talks about what will happen if Robb fails.

> have grown up as a kid in Ceausescu's one-party state Romania and I have to tell you that this doesn't look good.

As an American, I can tell you that unfortunately nobody on either side will be willing to heed your warning here. In our polarized climate, everyone seems to think that they can do autocracy better.

I've grown up around a lot immigrants from Romania and other former-dictatorships and they're all shouting to anyone who will listen right now about how dangerous this all is. My ex-Soviet coworkers are discussing where in Europe they're going to relocate to this year.

> Of course, I had to get all that info from thedonald.win because almost no-one else is talking about this.

This and the Twitter account that you linked is the usual "no one is talking about this! they are hiding the truth" rhetoric that has lead to where we are four years later.

I had to move four pages into the comment thread to find this salient point. Once obvious infrastructure providers talk of getting involved in censorship, things get scary.

Were private companies able to refuse to publish Ceausescu’s remarks? Were private companies even a thing?

It’s not a purge, it’s a website. And it’s a website that can ban users, even presidents, because it exists in a free land.

That’s not a purge. It’s a database change. Donald and Flynn can go make their own platform.

This is gasoline on the fire.

When banning someone like donald trump you need to have a great press release for justification. You need to point to something that people who are in the middle will read and think, yeah that makes sense, I'm surprised you didn't do that earlier.

Instead, they have this PR that I honestly disagree with, even in the current climate, I don't see it.

I can only think, they wanted to ban him before he left office in order to set a precedent that they could ban him before he left office, and use that for some sort of future legal justification. I could see this as a use to ban future presidents before the 4 years are over. Or if he became president again they wouldn't have to re-instate his account.

Lack of empathy to how we got here is the biggest problem.

I disagree. I think Donald Trump’s tweets were the gasoline. I have serious doubts this fire can go on without him. Hopes, at least.

Beyond things that are broadly considered reprehensible (e.g. videos of rape), I'm not convinced that moderation/deplatforming is healthy for society.

I definitely get the "my company - my rules" POV. The First Amendment doesn't apply to private spaces.

Then again, I'm not convinced that moderators ought to have the power to control what sorts of ideas are interrogated publicly (e.g. in the company of strangers). It's particularly problematic when the social climate at the companies that control these platforms is synonymous with the Progressive echochamber, but it's also hard to imagine any body that would be qualified to police ideas.

One of the worst things to happen this decade is the rise of social echochambers, where groups of people intellectually isolate themselves amongst likeminded people, writing-off dissenters as evil strawmen. The groupthink in these echochambers is nudged further to the extremes by the loudmouthed activists who control what ideas people are comfortable expressing. Large groups isolating themselves in these constantly drifting echochambers leads to the problems we saw this week in Washington. I fear making the platforms synonymous with these echochambers will only make this problem worse.

Anonymity and free expression have historically been some of the best qualities of the Internet. Anyone can say - and think - anything, and share those thoughts with everyone. That's always included snark, parody, and similar absurdities. People don't always mean what they say - they often might not even know _if_ they mean what they say.

Those same qualities make it particularly vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Figuring out how to help people understand what's likely to be true without censoring the kinds of ideas people can openly express is one of the great challenges of our time. I really hope we solve it.

I think that we should look at phone numbers for the solution. I can call my friend on another phone network with no problem. My friend can transfer his number to a third company and I can still reach him on the same phone number. So the solution would need to be a standardized protocol and a guarantee that you can freely switch your whole account to a different provider.

Imagine if you're on Twitter and you can follow a person on Parler. Parler has a right to moderate their own private space however they want. Twitter has a right to moderate their space however they want. But - Twitter can't influence how others moderate their spaces.

So let's say that you are on Twitter and follow Trump on Twitter. Twitter decides to ban Trump. Trump should be able to migrate his account (with the username and profile history) to Parler and you, using Twitter would still magically follow him as before and would be able to read what he posts in your Twitter feed. Twitter would still be able to not show his tweets in their search, or their trending topics or any proprietary feature of the service, but if someone follows him explicitly, they'd still see his tweets in their timeline.

This is only possible because phone service is considered a utility and a number is like an address. These same rules prevent the phone company from doing things like declining your business and censoring your calls.

The fact that these social media companies are not utilities is the entire reason that they need Section 230 protection.

It sounds to me like the argument that you're making is that access to the internet _and_ identity on the internet are utilities that Americans cannot legally be deprived of. But that would make it so that Twitter could not ban people in the first place.

I am loving people who don't understand that they are literally supporting billionaires while claiming to be anti-corporate resistance.

Definition of Liberal used to be: "Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas. Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise."

I am still a liberal. But I am not the current liberal.

> Definition of Liberal used to be: "Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas.

What an unusual POV

civil rights movement: not liberal

Vietnam war protesters: not liberal

Where did you find these liberals? The don't seem to have much in common with the liberals I know.

I live in the Midwest. Attacking black people on the street, kidnapping elected officials, these are not ‘new’ ideas I’m open to. Yet this is happening, and escalating... and most certainly Trump is the tip of the spear for that movement in this part of the world.

Let’s spend some time reading books, maybe we can go back to solving illusive pedophile rings online when we are better educated as a species.

I am a brown immigrant myself and I don't need you to save me. I have NEVER EVER seen Trump attacking black people nor asked to kidnap officials. You are living in an echo chamber built of lies.

And you putting all conservatives in the "solving illusive pedophile rings online" clearly shows you are living in an echo chamber.

Seems like a classic case of anecdotes vs. anecdotes, shrug

You both have your points, both are probably right :)

Those liberals are now considered conservatives/libertarians. I want no part of the current form of "liberalism", if it means censoring other people like these companies have consistently done. Free speech is a principle to me, not just some "law".

How do you feel about all the whataboutism coming from the people who held a violent insurrection on our nations Capitol?

I mean, liberal =/= progressives =/= democratic party.

Only in USA the word liberal has this very strange meaning one is forced to add "classical" to clarify its definition.

>I am loving people who don't understand that they are literally supporting billionaires while claiming to be anti-corporate resistance.

The billionaire in question is Trump, isn't it?

>Definition of Liberal used to be: "Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas. Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise."

Well this just comes back to the paradox of tolerance. I consider myself a liberal (in the British or non-American sense) and in my opinion fascism should not be tolerated.

Only fascism or any other collectivist ideology?

Sure, but the threat of fascism in any given Western nation that I know of is far greater than the threat of communism, which is rather dead.

> than the threat of communism, which is rather dead.

Huh? The largest nation on the planet is literally a Communist nation and has its eyes set on being the global seat of power while simulatenously bribing half the world to look the other way.

The internment camps should be a clue.

Well China isn't really communist any more, it sort of began to abandon that with Deng Xiaoping, but regardless, my point is there's truly minimal risk of communists coming to power in any Western country that I know of. I perceive the thread of fascists gaining power in the West as far greater. I should have been clearer, my mistake.

It's still a single-party state guided by a Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

Also, given the not even guarded political opinions of my overwhelmingly-Marxist peers who work in federal civil service jobs in the DC area, I think that we're far closer than you think.

But I will certainly agree the danger is in any collectivist-utopian promise for a government. They all rely on the same brutal methods like ethnic cleansing and tend to look the same other than what's written on their red armbands.

I don't think there's any remotely plausible prospect of America becoming a Marxist state. Your paranoia is noted, however, and it is typical of Americans, and probably in part why your society is so often so unwell (at least, that's my pet theory).

"in any given Western nation"

I think people from at least some countries of the world would disagree with you about communism being dead. Is there any major fascist political party in the west that has any kind of msm support? On the other hand, almost every western country has a socialist party in their respective parliament. As liberal doesn't it bother you that ideas which were the cause of so much misery in the world when implemented in communist countries are still being recycled over and over in parliaments of western countries at least as much as a few fascists do?

> I think people from at least some countries of the world would disagree with you about communism being dead

Possibly, but to me in the West I don't feel like there's any remotely plausible threat of communists coming to power in my country or any Western country that I know of.

> On the other hand, almost every western country has a socialist party in their respective parliament

I know I'm probably talking to an American here so I guess there's a reasonable chance that everything that isn't libertarian hyper-capitalism is literally Juche communism, but in reality, these mainstream so-called "socialist parties" in the West are overwhelmingly liberal in character. There are exceptions, such as Die Linke in Germany, and yeah I find them pretty vile, but they're mostly irrelevant. For example, I am British and our mainstream opposition party is nominally "socialist" but in actual fact fundamentally liberal and not at all about the overthrow of capitalism.

> As liberal doesn't it bother you that ideas which were the cause of so much misery in the world when implemented in communist countries are still being recycled over and over in parliaments of western countries

For the aforementioned reasons, where European "socialist" parties are more about making capitalism a little bit less American/cutthroat/fuck-you-I-got-mine, rather than literal democratic ownership of the means of production, no, not really. Europe is fundamentally capitalist and liberal.

In the UK you don't have an iota of a "fascist" party to be worried about. I agree that the labour party is only "nominally socialist", but at least from Corbyn forward I would not call them liberal. And they have lost touch with the working people about at the same time as well.

Because they are not liberals like you, they are leftists.

I find This whole "incitement to violence is bad" thing to be nonsensical.

Political speech is practically always incitement to violence:

According to Weber, the state is a "human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." [1]

And political discussions are about what the state should do (executive decisions, laws, etc), that is, in which cases it should coerce people, who should it coerce, and what should it do with the result of that coercion (e.g. taxes). Coercion ultimately leads to violence if the coerced individual doesn't surrender.

So, I can't take this "incitement to violence is bad" thing seriously. Because if they truly believed that, then all political speech should be banned.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-monopoly-on-violence

This is a Michael Jordan in Space Jam level stretch. Speech is also just vibrations of air and text is just electric charges on circuits.

"Political speech is practically always incitement to violence".

Yes, but also for a somewhat different reason than you give.

What happens when a party gets elected, has control all the levers of government for the next four years, and enacts a law that some people object to? Well, the objectors may march around the legislature chanting "we won't stand for this!". What could they mean, since they have no power to do anything until at least the next election?

Such protests happen frequently, by people of all ideologies. Implicit in these protests is the idea that even when a party has control of all parts of government, they still are sensitive to public opinion, just as absolute monarchs are, since there is always the possibility that the people will revolt - either violently, or by lower-level forms of civil disobedience.

One major justification for democracy is that it minimizes the chance of civil war, by having the election result mimic the result of a civil war (in which numbers on each side presumably count for a lot), at far less cost. But sensible democratically-elected leaders realize that an election victory does not perfectly mimic the result of civil war (or of less violent forms of struggle), and that even if it did, it may be that their opponents will not judge their chances of success realistically.

At that level of generality, a lot of things are political since one of the definitions of politics, according to Merriam-Webster [1] is: "the total complex of relations between people living in society". Does this now mean that if I hang out with a friend, this may, under this very broad definition, be considered political? Is your suggestion then that me asking my friend to hang out is in some way an incitement to violence?

I feel like these sorts of categorizations based on broad definitions of terms almost never arrive at anything substantive. Categories are generally always fuzzy on the boundaries and using strict definitions to demarcate them is a complicated process (see, for example, the Judicial System).

Also I find this opinion preposterous because the incitement to violence in this instance has nothing to do with "political discussions about what the state should do". The President certainly did not have a political discussions with his supporters about what the state should do - rather, people in a state voted to decide who should lead, according to rules that ostensibly most of the citizens agree with, which the losing party then tried to contest by trying to wield violence themselves.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/politics

I understand how Twitter says that these are relevant to the recent events, but it feels like they were just sitting around waiting for him to tweet something they could latch onto to use as a reason to remove him. Because these tweets seem innocent compared to so many of his others.

Really not sure how I feel about this though... weighing between the benefits of allowing open speech on “town square” Internet forums versus enforcing their right as a private entity and removing his violence-inciting self.

Either way, this is a huge deal

There’s probably some political infighting going on at twitter’s decision making committee. Maybe some people threatened to resign or something, or maybe @jack just told them to ban Trump now.

> these tweets seem innocent compared to so many of his others.

I think they wanted to say that the context matters. I.e. with actual violence happening not long ago and with a possibility of more violence in future, I’d say that posting relatively innocent tweets contributes to building tension.

I agree and they should have articulated the clear and present danger of this much better. E.g. the inauguration as one very clear example

They are already planning for the 20th on different platforms. It just takes one more tweet from DJT to light another fire.

And the problem is these people don't care what the content is, they read what they want to read because the Q conspiracy is insane. Even if he tweeted "mmm my mcdonalds burger tonight is extra good" they would read something insane into it

Me thinks this will have huge implications for big tech. A Pandora’s box was just opened.

That private businesses can keep people off of their properties?

Pretty sure that is exactly what will change.

clearly it’s more than that. these companies are more than just private companies they are social utilities. and might be regulated as such in the future. that’s my point.

I’ve been sitewide banned from Reddit twice. It’s always been this way.

You're not the president of the United States.

There really shouldn’t be any distinction. The President, while a very powerful figure, is still a citizen. If we’re going to complain about rich people having privileges that poorer people don’t, then Trump is no different in that respect.

Regardless, if Trump wants to, he has official means (through whitehouse.gov) to issue statements. He choose Twitter when he had other options.

If anything, the president should be held to a higher standard.

you aren't the president. Any future elected official now has to consider if these social media companies are a good medium to communicate with the people. If that elected official doesn't play big tech's rules, the looming threat of a ban might change their mind.

It's crazy naive to not see the implications of this

The President has access to TV (this one mainly uses it to go on long winded rambling call-ins to Fox and Friends), not to mention a fairly comprehensive web platform of his own to communicate.

This is a President who wouldn't even use the designated @potus account because he is so narcissistic he wanted the follower count for himself.

the implications being??? that it's not a great idea for the POTUS (or equivalent) to consider a private communications platform as their official "channel to the people"? well, duh! who'd have thunk?

The president has to follow the TOS just like any other user. They aren’t a king.

What good reason is there for the president to not simply communicate via whitehouse.gov or equivalent?

You might argue that it has lesser reach compared to a major social media site, but there are countless individuals and organizations that would jump to be the first one posting a link to a presidential address on social media sites.

It's almost as if there are official channels to communicate information. Ones that aren't private companies.

Twitter and the like were never a good medium to communicate with the people. Seldom can you say anything serious in 140 characters.

That statement is incoherent.

If you say things big tech doesn’t like, you get deplatformed. This applies to everyone.

If you got banned the first time you couldn't get banned a second time.

Which is more than just semantics. Suspending an account and the associated momentum without actually banning the person might be a good mechanism to have in place.

I get banned all the time from reddit. So much so that I have like 10 alt accounts premade so I can just slowly shift from one to the next. Sometimes I don't even know why I get banned.

No. Right now, they are in fact just private companies. They are not de jure social utilities, even if they act as if they are de facto.

Now, maybe they should be, and should be regulated as such. Maybe we should have a conversation about delegating services which are key to our social fabric to what are just private companies. But that's somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand.

Additionally, should be noted: if the government attempted to coerce or strong-arm Twitter to keep Donald Trump's account online, that would absolutely be a textbook 1st Amendment violation.

Corporations are legal persons, and have constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment. Coerced speech is not free speech.

I didn’t say that they were social utilities right now, I’m saying this could very well spark interest in regulating social media as more than just any old private business with zero regulatory framework attached to them.

> ...these companies are more than just private companies they are social utilities.

They are not though. They are just private companies. We can argue until the cows come home about how people see them, how they use them, how they feel about them... but at the end of the day they are just private companies.

I agree that we should consider whether that should remain the case. But right now... it is the case.

I think this is an instance of the biggest, most disastrous fallacy of the last half century: that a company is a social utility.

It’s not. It’a a bunch of rich people in California. If you want a public utility for communication and socializing, go help build one. Contribute to Mastodon or the rest of the fediverse. Write to representatives (or become one yourself) and propose legislation to fund a public tool that is actually owned by the people. It could even be part of the fediverse!

But asking Twitter to do any random thing someone wants because they are a big company is insane and is going to cause us nothing but pain.

how is it crazy to want to apply a regulatory framework to certain industries? we do that for cable companies, ISPs, banks, publishers, food producers, restaurants, etc etc. So why not social media?

The only reason is these companies are “new” and were not viewed as much more than a toy until a few years ago and now we’re seeing the consequences of that.

I don’t think wanting a regulatory framework is bad at all (though I think in the last few decades, we have naïvely tried to regulate companies into doing things that are simply counter to their nature rather than solving problems directly, eg minimum wage vs UBI).

A utility is different than a regulated company.

But these are the services that people actually use. On Mastodon you end up with... well the sort of person who uses Mastodon. Which means that the people that run those services have some degree of de facto influence, which in turn means that they are likely to end up regulated and constrained by other powerful actors.

Today it's rich people in California, once it was rich people building railroads and pumping oil.

You put it more eloquently than I could. It is a private company but it also hosts world leaders as a dispatch service. Something feels off about a single company being able to indiscriminately terminate voices at a whim.

Should the New York Times be allowed to indiscriminately decline publication of OpEds?

Trump has no shortage of places that he can speak his voice and people will hear him. He can call any news station right now. He could make an account on Parler or many other social media sites.

No specific company is obligated to broadcast his messages. The government can't obligate anyone who doesn't want it to run his propaganda.

I do not have any interest in Trump. I trust my American friends will do whatever is best for them and I respect that. This is bigger than that for me. Everyone uses Twitter, news corportations across the divides reference it. If it is being edited from the top, that seems scary is all. In 10 years, maybe no one will remember Trump, but maybe the person who is right for your vote will not have a voice to reference.

Twitter edits their site from the top all the time. It would look like your spam folder if they didn't. They remove spam, harassment, calls to violence, etc. It would not be popular if they didn't do any of this.

> these companies are more than just private companies they are social utilities.

No, no they're not. If you or others personally perceive them as utilities, you have skewed perception of reality. I mean not even the ISP you're using to access them aren't considered utilities. It's funny that the same people who applauded Pai for the net neutrality thing are the ones complaining about 'big tech censorship'.

I see there's a wikipedia entry about social media as public utility (which I take to be what you mean by 'social utilities' in the sense of regulation). To my knowledge, though, this is just a theoretical construct, not a legal one, yet in this thread it's seems to be taken for granted that treating Twitter as a utility is just another tool in the (U.S.) government's toolbox. Is there any reason to think it actually is? Seems offhand like a stretch, but I'm no legal scholar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...

that it gives ammo to section 230 reform

Big tech has gotten away with the monopoly-but-not-abuse-of-monopoly argument for a decade because the platforms were free and available to everyone.

If the second point is not true anymore... it's going to start getting regulated like a utility. Your electric and phone providers can't simply decide to stop serving people it doesn't like, and likely, Twitter won't either.

Electric & phone providers had use of public resources & space, a right-of-way across private land, etc.

Today, Twitter. Tomorrow, FiOS.

FiOS doesn't have to service you

Let's check the terms they agreed to when we, the people, gave them a monopoly on fiber service running through extremely space-constrained boxes under our streets.

This is a very relevant point for about 2005.

In the years since then, what was once a constellation of internet platforms has shrunken and consolidated to only a handful that are the de facto gatekeepers.

Legally, of course, nothing has changed since then. But it's willfully ignoring the unprecedented power of major platforms in shaping popular dialog to compare them to a local supermarket escorting someone out.

How about private business (Apple) disallowing people to use an app (parler) on their property (iPhone)?

It's within their right and probably a terrible corner we have painted ourselves into. But you can't even get people to use firefox. So what to do?

Maybe Parler users can take a page from BLM's book and have some peaceful protests in front of Apple Stores all over the country.

Since Parler was a nexus of these terrorists attacks, are you suggesting the same for apple? What are you suggesting? I'm so sick of these vague right wing threats.

Well, protest is the language of the unheard [1]. Or you are suggesting that Floyd protests were terrorist attacks and organized via Parler?

[1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-protest-is-the-language-...

We're two days from a hostile coup and you're suggesting protests. I really don't know what to think about your suggestion honestly.

The US are indeed in a coup. However, if you think that occupying the Capitol was the coup, you are in for a rude awakening.

Most people acknowledge that social media has an unprecedented ability to sway elections. Wouldn't it follow that allowing them to deplatform politicians is a seriously concerting form of censorship, private business or no?

I see this comment a lot.

What does suppression of free speech in America look like to you then?

To follow up, if I would have to imagine it for a book, this is how I would write it — why I think there needs to be better regulation/rights here.

How long until it happens to a marginalized population at scale?

Generally curious your thoughts otherwise. Thanks and be well

So we need the gov to create a public twitter? It is not very hard or expensive, and twitter will loose market

That box was opened long ago.

Not too long ago. I think the Pandora's box is that the social media companies really had a choice of two universes:

* A world where they weren't the arbiters of truthiness, and were a place that supported 'free speech'.

* A world where they decide what posts to show, and it's their job to moderate the platform.

The decision to take the second approach is actually a pretty recent development. These companies can no longer hide behind the 'we are just a platform for free speech' line of thinking, because they have now decided that's not what they are about.

What defines social media company? You're using social media right now. I'm sure you would expect basic protections.

When I’m referring to “these companies” I’m specifically talking about the ones in this news article - namely Fb/Insta/Twitter. Very recently FBs position was that their platform shouldn’t be filtering ‘fake news’ because they are a communication platform rather than a media company.

Clearly different sites will choose a different position on filter vs free speech.

Filtering / moderation has usually been applied to “forums” (of which I would lump HN with) rather than “social graph websites” where posts are typically shared between friends and followers.

> I'm sure you would expect basic protections.

Actually I don’t to be honest! I think free speech is generally the best policy. I do think reform is required though in how posts (and advertisements) are displayed and ranked on social feeds though for instance.

People are banned all the time. The only reason he wasn’t banned earlier, and there has been plenty of opportunity to do so, is that he stood in a position of privilege, having been elected president.

If TOS will begin to also apply to famous people then I welcome its opening.

nah, a pandoras box was opened in wake of the 9-11 attacks. In comparison, this has practically no implications for big tech going forward.

People are banned all the time for all kinds of reasons. Only when it’s” conservatives “ does the outrage machine spin up. The only reason he made it this far is because he got special treatment for YEARS

This has been my experience. I used to help moderate a forum, and never had any issue at all banning people for posting racist stuff up until 2016. Then people started calling that "political" and insisted I was biased against conservatives after I banned someone (who happened to be of a certain political affiliation) for making a thread full of just "fuck muslims". It caused drama and I left. People are overly primed for the narrative that conservatives are irrationally oppressed online and they ignore details to make it fit.

* behaves like a xenophobic asshole online *

* experiences backlash, gets banned *

"Help, that's unfair! The left is censoring me!!"

Astonishing how many times I've seen this exact situation play out. Reminds me of kids doing a bad thing and then crying and shifting blame when they get caught.

The Pandora's box was opened when there was a violent takeover of the Capitol. Not because some tech company ban a garbage human being

Funny thing is these nerds think they’re getting “in” now and that they’ve paid their dues. They never had a chance.

It used to be fairly uncontroversial that internet forums could be heavily moderated. Many of the more valuable forums I frequented in my youth were often moderated to stay on topic and cut down on spam. I cannot imagine paying much attention 20 years ago if a random forum decided even to go further than Twitter has and simply ban all Republicans or all Democrats. Indeed there are many subreddits that go this far with little fanfare. What is the dividing line here between these sites and Twitter?

Another question - what burden does a Twitter ban impose on free speech on the Internet? If Twitter bans me, I am free to move to another social media site like Parler or even make my own blog. If my views are despicable enough then some services may refuse to host me but I am unaware of anyone who has been totally bereft of a solution to put up a website.

These alternatives fail to impress for one obvious reason. It's harder to get eyeballs on Joe's random Q blog than on Twitter or Facebook. Similarly I could self-publish a book - and people do - but I lack the expertise necessary to actually get anyone to read it. I personally see social media as a set of publishers rather than as a printing press, hence why I'm not too chagrined by this decision.

I agree completely.

Expecting privately held companies to serve as free speech platforms is unrealistic.

The 1st Ammendment is something the Government is held to, not private companies.

We don't expect book publishers or book stores to sell every type of book there is.

In the same way we shouldn't expect social media websites to allow every type of content on their platforms.

I also think the twitter ban won’t mute them: they can always move to a website - yet websites can be banned and censored too.

They let him concede, waited a day, and then nuked him. It's too little too late, but I'll take it.

This was the straw that broke's the camel's back, Trump's influence is waning (since he's not going to be in office any more in a few days), and even his supporters are distancing themselves. I don't think Twitter could have done this earlier without risking lots of blowback.

You may agree with this new power now when its used on Trump, but you might not agree with it in the future. By then it will have been too late.

If I incite a mob to march on the seat of government, commit acts of sedition against The United States, and directly threaten the peaceful transfer of power, and refuse to abide by the terms of service, I deserve _a lot_ more than being banned from my social media site. You have to look at it in context.

Any leader inciting insurrection against their own country should be banned.

You know what? I don't think anyone I would support has a problem clearing that very low bar.

Maybe people should be less concerned that Trump got banned for being a lying, traitorous piece of shit and more concerned that he was ever president in the first place.

This power has been used in ways I disagree with since before Trump ran for office. I still prefer a rules-based society to anarchy.

However, I also prefer anarchy to oligarchy: People have even specifically demonstrated that Trump was receiving special privileges which prevented him from being banned, and they did so by getting themselves banned for tweeting copies of his tweets.

The looser does not have to concede. There's no requirement to do so, and there's precedent not to as well.

Surely there is an important difference between just not conceding and actively campaigning false allegations of voter fraud.

Do they have to incite a mob to overtake the halls of a separate and equal branch of our government resulting in the deaths of five people including a police officer?

With great power comes great responsibility. The president of the United States should be aware of how his words will be received. And he is responsible for the consequences of those words. He doesn't have to concede but by constantly claiming the election was stolen he is responsible for the ensuing violence.

First president in history to be banned from twitter

That'd be Raúl Castro (Cuba for the unaware).

It's still there: https://twitter.com/POTUS

He posted there apparently and Twitter removed the tweets.

https://twitter.com/banthebbc/status/1347720547455688704

(not endorsing this account, just linking to the screenshots)

Heh, they are quite thorough. There were a lot of video tweets on that account last time I looked.

Just to keep things in perspective, Twitter was founded in like 2006 so Twitter has only lived through 3 presidents.

Just a quiet word from a free speech advocate who has lived in China and spoken extensively with victims of the Cultural Revolution. The overheated rhetoric here and the shrill denunciations of political rivals ring all too familiar. Ask your older Chinese friends and colleagues how they view the matter of political censorship. You may find their observations salient.

Same for my family members that escaped Vietnam. They lived though the fall of South VN and the rise of Communist VN. They see and feel similarities now that scare and depress them.

Sorry to go off-topic, but is anyone else logged in to HN and experiencing very slow response times? Except for the times HN has gone down, I've never seen it take 5-10 seconds just to load the front page or any of the comment threads. I'm assuming it has something to do with so many users checking out this thread, which is pretty amazing for a Friday night.

(viewing HN in logged out mode is much faster thanks to the caching)

Yes

+1 from me on the slow times, maybe it's because of this very thread that has attracted lots of interest? I couldn't tell.

9 seconds to load the reply page.

Yup, everypage is super slow.

HN is hugging itself to death.

It's sad: everyone claims to be in favor of "democracy" --- yet when a tiny number of unaccountable, anonymous, biased people inside big tech companies place limits on what the whole world can say, people cheer.

When you support the kind of arbitrary governance, you're cheering for authoritarianism, cheering for oppression, and ultimately cheering for a kind of tech feudalism. Don't give me this "it's a private company" line: unaccountable individuals at corporations can deny you transportation, speech, and financial services --- they can ruin your life merely because they dislike you. Yes, tech companies can't take away your freedom. They can't put you in jail. But they can effectively exile you from civilization. Should private individuals have that power?

I get it. Some people are just fundamentally uncomfortable with democracy: public consensus is a messy way to govern a society. Besides: Twitter and other tech companies are, right now, making the decisions that you think are right. But what you're essentially doing is opting into a VC-funded startup that offers you cool stuff at an unsustainably low price. When the VCs demand a profit, that company will raise its prices, and you, locked in, will be forced to pay, forever.

Power works the same way: give up control to individuals now and you might like the immediate results, but you'll change your mind when those individuals start doing things you dislike, and when they do, you'll have no recourse. Throughout history, we find that people who vote dictators into power regret it later. Let's not repeat that old mistake.

While your High School Civics class said a lot of things, the reality is (most of) The Founders got together because they saw where things were headed and they were terrified of mob violence that was breaking out in the colonies. They worried that either the Brits would arrive a crush things, or the locals would turn on them with tar and feather.

So they got together and engineered a very weak democracy, unsure which direction it would go in. They left a lot of messy bits unresolved.

Twitter is a platform without an editor or oversight. It is a platform for mobs. Our Founders would have been terrified of it.

Your "reality" of early American history is nonsense.

Your rebuttal is neither informative nor helpful.

This is actually the most accurate description of almost ALL revolutions, if not all. If you read history, you will see the leaders of revolutions are not ordinary people. They are always elites. Revolutions always been less powerful elites getting rid of more powerful elites. People are just pawns in their games.

This sets a terrible precedent. If you believe in democracy, you should let the public choose what they want or don't want to hear. Now we have Jack Dorsey controlling the public discourse. If you don't trust the public, you really don't believe in democracy.

They already can. No one is forcing you to use Twitter. There are plenty of other platforms, or you can even... wait for it, this is such a radical idea... host your own website.

Is this also your opinion when it comes to recruitment and advertising of ISIS via social media?

Twitter being a private company aside, DT has shown that he is willing to incite violence.

Twitter has a responsibility to ban him unless it wants to be held accountable for what he does next.

Twitter is already largely responsible for this mess in the first place, without their platform viralizing his message of hate he may never have become president.

One side began returning home almost immediately after the situation escalated, and has since been so widely shocked by the violence that occurred that many continue to be sceptical it was even born of their movement.

The other side, through most of the year, not only didn't denounce the violence, but celebrated it as democracy in action, including one TV anchor that asked to be shown "where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful."

One political faction is being torn to rubble over violence it likely never intended (and from which no positive outcome would have been possible), which effectively allows the other side to enshrine violence with clear and obvious benefits to them.

Your equivocation of the two sides is such BS and just desperate whataboutism. Was there violence and destruction at rallies over the summer that was criminal? Yes and it wasn’t ok. I expect prosecutions, convictions and restitution. But on Tuesday what occurred was a violent takeover of the legislative branch of government by a mob incited by the defeated leader of another branch to prevent the official recognition of his opponents win. Give me a fucking break.

I'm not equivocating the two, although re-reading my post I can see I left that impression. The violence in each case is disturbing to me, in different ways and for different reasons.

I'm merely trying to sort out why the response to, and consequences of, the violence of one side seems so disproportionate to that of the other side, seeing as we both seem to agree violence is harmful to a civil society.

So far, the only answer I can discern essentially comes down to "because I agree with my side more than yours", in which case, the side with the bigger mob will always win, rather than an honest discussion of ideas.

Even if you disagree, if you set aside your hostilities and assume I say this in good faith for just a moment, I don't think it's that great of a stretch to see why this would be confusing.

I believe that you are speaking in good faith. I like to think I am as well. I guess reading your initial comment, I assumed that you were saying the overwhelmingly peaceful protests associated with George Floyd were the same as those who peacefully participated in the protests but not in the violent insurrection; but I just can’t think of the peaceful maga protesters in the same light as those peacefully protesting for fairer policing. I agree with you that it’s very nuanced, but I make a distinction because of the visuals and results of the assault on the Capitol by the extremes of their group. Furthermore, one side worships Trump and his actions while the other just fundamentally wants fairer and better police. I know my post came out as aggressive, that was not right. For that I apologize and believe you were not equivocating. (Trying to convey nuance on mobile is hard, sorry for word soup)

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. You were completely right to call out my initial post, it was poorly worded.

Much as you said, regardless of the issue, we can often agree on what's right or wrong from a moral standpoint, but still it's intrinsically hard to view the core issue being fought for in the same light as we view the other side.

Generally speaking, I don't believe folks on the left want an unfair election system, nor that folks on the right want violent or discriminatory policing, but we each start with an assumption of which problem is more pressing, and from there it becomes easy to make several leaps of judgement.

Conveying nuance is hard... not just on mobile :) but across the board.

What I'm struggling the most to sort out here, is how I can feel that we all as a nation still generally want the same things on paper, and yet it can feel so much like we have nothing in common at all. Somehow, there's a large gap to be bridged there.

I think you've hit the nail on the head in your third paragraph; most people are reasonable and in agreement on most things but through our nature, culture or a mix a both, we tend to assume the worst of each other and project the worst on each other at the first opportunity. I know I'm not immune from this reaction. Sadly, this reflexive animosity is really what distracts most of us from harmful legislation and actions. I wish you well :-) Thanks for the discussion - the back and forth is nice and allows one to stake/state their position more eloquently.

It sounds like he tweeted new things today that they considered breaching their earlier warning? Does anyone know what those tweets were?

Edit: Oh, damn, I had just seen the Twitter Safety and just assumed that this was linking to that, not to a separate blogpost. As many people have pointed out it was for these two tweets:

On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump tweeted:

“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

Shortly thereafter, the President tweeted:

“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

It quotes them in the article.

Per the linked article:

> The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!

> To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.

Ok so he’s dissing the incoming President... ok, that’s rude. But the other preceding text is pretty anodyne.

I think it’s clear about controlling the narrative.

In the end what this will do is kickstart more of an echochamber on another service, they’ll diverge and we’ll get people in one camp on one platform, the other camp in the other. Except they’ll be more extreme on both sides as moderates tail off.

One interpretation is that his supporters should feel confident attacking the inauguration knowing he won’t be there to be injured.

They are already openly planning violence: https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1347609631527489537?...

What? Is this pre-crime we’re getting into now?

What the hell happened to us?

There's blood and bullet holes in the halls of Congress! Principles of neutrality and restraint fly out the window when the seat of government is attacked by a violent mob. We can't just keep our fingers crossed that they don't mean it when they say they're coming back.

What is a government without neutrality.

Not much more than a big gorilla with a lot of guns. That's why maintaining the principles of neutrality is so important - and why we must react so severely when someone breaches the principles of neutrality to try and install their preferred politicians into power.

He hasn’t been charged with anything, so no. I would like to think Twitter would ban any public figure who appears to be inciting a second terrorist attack mere days after inciting a first one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(criminal)

He's anticipating (planning?) further attacks on the Capitol and wants to be a safe distance away?

>They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!

That's pretty clearly a veiled threat taken in light of all his other statements and the violence from just days ago.

That's so Orwellian. That so obviously reads... "we wanted to ban him, so we did".

Like, if you want to ban him based on past tweets, just do it. But to claim that this tweet is inciting violence is just farcical.

Be prepared for more nebulous, uncharitable "you're lending support to those who promote violence" bans in the future. Wouldn't be surprised to see it being used more aggressively across a variety of platforms in the coming weeks.

Or "dog whistles", which the left seems to be able to hear, rendering the term utterly illogical.

The downvotes on these sensible comments clearly shows me HN is filled with anti-liberals who support big tech billionaires while claiming to be resistance.

Meh, at this point it's half unemployed Europeans with a scattering of paid Chinese and Russian agitators. I don't read anything into the downvotes.

The article states in Twitter's reasoning that:

The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.

Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.

It seems possible if not likely that Twitter is closely monitoring how his followers are reacting to the tweets (at a scale that none of us are really capable of), and the permanent ban results most closely from that.

It is also possible that Twitter is trying to evade liability in case there are more attacks and there was some organization on their platform.

> To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.

Imagine living in a society where saying either of these things is a banning offense. To all the censorship apologists here: you've given unelected and unaccountable people at big tech companies the ability to decide what people can say in public. Is that really the world you want to live in?

I'd rather live in that world than the world where my national legislature flees their chambers in fear of a mob trying to overturn the democratic process. Do you have a third option to suggest?

Yes, because as the article discusses, in context these tweets are being interpreted by his followers as, “don’t give up.” There are already postings on Parler about coming back to DC on the 19th and 20th.

His entire presidency was marked by #NotMyPresident and every democrat member of government, media, and tech all supporting protests against him for 4 years straight. Did they give up? If not, then why should his supporters?

They're welcome to protest, but as a society we draw the line at terrorism. Don't do that.

If you read the post it's pretty clear that a random person saying either of those won't get them banned. Twitter talks a lot about the context around them, how other people are interpreting them, and how past actions of Trump are influencing their decision.

It's their platform. I probably couldn't get an editorial in the NYT, either, should I throw a fit about that too?

Would you support the electricity and water companies shutting off people's supplies because they have the wrong views? There are some services so fundamental to participation in society that only the state ought to be able to take them away. Social media is on the list.

> There are some services so fundamental to participation in society that only the state ought to be able to take them away. Social media is on the list.

Ah, reading that opened my eyes because, personally, I really couldn't disagree more. I suspect that disagreement on this is behind much of why people don't see eye-to-eye on this "private censorship" issue. I know very few people who use social media, and I don't see anything lacking from their role in society as a result. No offense, just my $0.02. :-)

The linked blog post actually did the opposite of what you're doing and put these tweets in context. He didn't just say these words unconnected to anything, man.

Gotta love people -- on a news site made for people who tinker with computers -- thinking in binary and not having nuance.

Subtext is important. The "Assessment" section of the linked article is pretty clear:

This determination is based on a number of factors, including:

- President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets (1, 2) by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scavino, that there would be an “orderly transition” on January 20th.

- The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.

- The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.

- The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election.

- Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.

Context is important when evaluating words. The president has historically shown a pattern of speaking out of both sides of his mouth ("stand back and stand by"). The pattern continues here.

Everyone focuses so much on censorship but nobody focuses on the opposite, that is - what does social media promote by default.

Well, this is what they promote: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 . They promote content that results with engagement since thats most profitable for them, above all else. It just so happens that emotional fake novelty spreads the most and leads to maximum engagement.

Optimizing for engagement above all else is what has lead to that unhealthy, toxic environment. Monsters have been created, and they are out of control. It doesn't matter who social media companies ban, or what was actually tweeted: if there is a way to interpret it in the most emotionally charged, exciting way, it will eventually be reinterpreted that way, just like a game of broken telephone.

The guardrails they've laid down are incredibly wide. A police officer died as a result of extreme rhetoric they left up from this guy - he had more than enough chances. I agree that these Tweets are only mildly inflammatory; but given the context that he should be doing everything in his power to calm the situation he caused, they're completely inappropriate.

Given that, "Is that really the world you want to live in?" ... Yes.

Absolutely not. But neither do I want any tech that becomes successful to be automatically be controlled by some somehow elected instance.

So, for this specific case: OK, Twitter, got you. We happen to be on the same side, but your reaction makes me migrate my (non-existing, for the same reasons) twitter account to something else.

IMHO, we need to ban every government and their agencies from relying on commercial services only: A minimalistic message routing protocol should exist that governments require participants in their market-place to support.

> To all the censorship apologists here: you've given unelected and unaccountable people at big tech companies the ability to decide what people can say in public. Is that really the world you want to live in?

You have things backwards: they haven't and in fact I do and already do.

What gives Twitter the right to decide what can be said via its software is the first amendment to the US constitution. Which is a world I live in and do want to live in -- it's stronger and better than the "free" speech guarantees in Europe.

The first amendment prevents elected people from deciding what people can and can't say in public.

And twitter banning someone doesn't actually control what they can say "in public", merely on Twitter. I don't use twitter and I heard about this from one of those other channels.

Throughout US history the person with the press has been able to decide what is printed on its press. Today there are more opportunities to be heard than ever before.

> Imagine living in a society where saying either of these things is a banning offense.

These tweets HAVE to be taken in context. It would be disingenuous to take every single one of his tweet at face value without considering his influence and position. He's dog whistled enough in the past, and look where that led.

> .. what people can say in public

Twitter != public Twitter cannot prevent you from physically speaking your opinion

The very idea of "freedom of speech" translates pretty poorly in the era of social media. Giving someone the freedom to speak their mind is orthogonal from giving them the ability to instantly amplify and broadcast their speech.

So are they going to apply to the same reasoning to government of Ethiopia, which apparently started a war not too long ago.

Or the governments of Armenia and the other place (Turkmenistan?).

The Chinese consulate was recently bragging on Twitter about how its their concentration camps are serving as feminist awareness centers for Uygar women.

Selectively addressing evils isn’t doing good: it’s taking sides.

Twitter is an American platform, and I doubt that they would expend resources to try quell misinformation and disinformation from third-world countries that have lower followership, little financial incentive and very low legal risk; relative to the US.

I'm from South Africa, and decided to temporarily log out of Twitter, because as a platform, it's become the kind of place for hashtag spam, wild conspiracies that are often dangerous and go unmoderated. Twitter has no incentive to do anything, the only times a tweet gets censored is when there's momentum in reporting it, or by chance if it gets caught in some other way.

The last numbers I heard were that there's <10 million active Twitter accounts. Compare that to the US.

The ultimate tragedy (for me) is how countries have ceded their digital lives/capabilities to American media companies. There's little reason for a South African messaging platform to not survive, given that the average South African only speaks to people in South Africa (those abroad could still use such service).

I really don't when a private company decides who gets air time and who doesn't. Oh well it's the world we live in.

Yes, it is the world we live in, and have pretty much always lived in. Private companies have been deciding who gets "air time" ever since we had radio or TV. And with the printing press, it's always been private companies deciding who gets airtime.

The appeal of social media is that they no longer had such a heavy hand about it. It's virtually the entire point.

s/social media/the web/

I'm pretty sure public utilities don't get to deny service for political wrongthink, though. And platforms like Android play store and the iPhone app store are definitely that (regarding Parler).

Political wrongthink has nothing to do with this. It's about the incitement to violence, something that even the 1st amendment doesn't protect.

They're that way regarding pornography, or even App names that give the hint of promoting drug use (Amphetamine, recently). Pretty much everything that's not acceptable on the 10pm news is kept out of app stores.

And I think that is wrong. Why can't I use apps regarding pornography, or about drug abuse. Why is the internet more and more neutered into a place for polite children?

I'll tell you when I started to hate this trend. A few weeks ago I saw a rich company owner on Linkedin trashing the regulator, with conspiracy theories and personal insults. There were no downvotes (because Linkedin does not allow downer reactions) and all comments were neutral or supportive. It was clearly wrong and no one dared say the wrong thing on Linkedin, because everyone has jobs and are afraid to speak against the president of a very important company. For the first time it really felt like I was on a new internet, sure I could write some words, I could create a profile and follow different people, but I knew I couldn't be myself, I couldn't express any negative (read: against the currently approved trends) comments, I couldn't read the wrong things. I was just mindlessly consuming, consuming the silly and harmless memes, consuming the neutured and feel good news, made to feel what I was supposed to be feeling about the world events. It's all a big party in all social media as long as you dot inside the lines. Nothing was explicitly stopping me, but there was always the cloud that if I say the wrong thing I'll get deplatformed, or worse, someone might badmouth me on Twitter and I lose my job. And there is no real alternative, we are social animals and desire some interaction and discussion.

I remember when I was a kid I was on the internet reading about philosophy and how to make bombs side by side. Do you know Al-Qaeda published a monthly magazine in English for years? Do you even imagine being able to read it now? Are you not even curious? How did this world became so scared of reading different points of view, when were we convinced that people can't handle their curiosity and at the same time maintain democracies work because they are ruled by the people.

I think this is something that we in tech need to discuss a loooot more.

Decades ago, it seemed that there were far more people in tech that were in experimental communities that explored these power relations better. These days, we are all a lot more normie. Sure, some people still go to Burning Man, but when was the last true co-op member you knew in a tech company? It seems so less frequent these days. We should be the ones writing stuff like this:

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

In the US, a corporation, after four years of deliberation, finally got the "courage" (at least that's how I imagine it going internal to Twitter), to ban the account of the government's prime executive. This would never happen in a place like China, because President Xi holds ultimate power.

But why does anybody even care if Twitter bans President Trump? It's because we have all given Twitter power over us in our consumption of information.

We need a hell of a lot more humanities in the tech world to help us understand all this more, a ton more study of power relations, more study of actual history of how power flows. More history of, say, the reconstruction after the US Civil War and before the Civil Rights Movement, of how small towns exerted power over Black residents both through soft economic power and through political power, and how those two interplayed with each other.

There's so much to learn from history as we try to navigate power on social networks. But the dynamic you saw on LinkedIn has played out every week of every year in every city in the US. It's not unique to social media in any way, it's the same brain structures and personal relationships going on, just on slightly different scales. And we need to understand those if we are to make good technology, and good policy to program society.

Twitter itself presents itself to investors and users as communication network, not a publisher or media company. This is a direct quote from the very first paragraph of their 10K filing:

> Twitter shows every side of the story.

So, I'd say the better analogy isn't a news station or printing press. This is more like if Verizon decided to start censoring your phone calls.

Twitter places plenty of restrictions on acceptable speech on their platform, regularly bans accounts for bad behavior, and regularly gives timeouts to accounts. Even mere insults are enough to get a week long timeout on Twitter.

I don't think I've ever seen Verizon suspend an account because of insults by phone call. Doesn't seem the least bit similar.

> Twitter shows every side of the story.

That's going to keep some securities fraud lawyers busy.

I really don't want the government to force me to serve people who destroy my private enterprise.

This isn't any different than a bar kicking out a patron for starting a fight - even if they happened to be the person with the largest bar tab.

You are right this is between a rock and a hard place. There was is something about the control of the spread of information that gets me. As someone else mentioned the moderation on HN is one of its strengths.

Maybe I've read too many books like 1984. It's the concentration of control of information that I don't like. If that control is in the hands of one company or the government it's all the same to me.

It scares me that one company reaches so many that banning one user can have political impacts. It also gives me hope that even POTUS isn't powerful enough to stop them.

Twitter, Facebook, etc, are more powerful than “air time.” They are the most dangerous propaganda tools ever created. As we continue to discover.

Only in the US. That’s why the UK has the BBC.

People get banned from Hacker News all the time, are you also upset about that?

Can you tell me anywhere this isn't the case besides maybe people raving on the street? Genuinely asking.

That’s how it always was, even pre internet.

I mean, precisely because it's a private company, so they can set their own rules, guidelines and procedures?

Twitter have clear terms of service, and Trump broke them multiple times on a daily basis for the past few months at least - if he hadn't have been POTUS, his account would have been terminated long ago.

Don't use their platform?

If it's disruptive for one private company to kick someone off, then perhaps they shouldn't have that much control over communication?

He can make statements from the White House. The White House, the house of Government of the United States, global hegemonic power still massively powerful even in an increasingly multipolar world.

If he has something important to say as the President of the United States, he can make an official statement as a head of state.

Nothing to be sorry about him losing a social media account.

Private companies already determine what you do with your waking hours and many other aspects of your life that you have to conform to or face homelessness or worse. This is only a smaller effect of control.

Very disturbing example of censorship and de-platforming. The rationale for permanent ban seems both reactionary and subjective.

The scant analysis provided under the "Assessment" stretches the words and context of the tweet to imbue it with the most uncharitable meaning possible.

This should be dismaying to non-political and political citizens alike, as well as supporters and non-supporters of this individual. I believe this because subduing your opposition with force (whether it be physical or social) is never an honorable way to triumph.

That's not what censorship means. Actual censorship, which was seen in Eastern and Central Europe and some other places during communism meant that you're literally not allowed to say certain things. You'd be prosecuted by the government if someone reported you or the government found out in any way that you were spreading certain kind of "forbidden" ideas. It didn't matter where you said it, when you said it, to how many people you said it, and if you used your own platform to say it or someone else's. It was simply not allowed.

What Americans call censorship is not that. Anyone who is banned from a particular platform still has freedom of speech. They can say whatever they want to whoever they want without the fear of government prosecution. If Twitter bans someone, it doesn't mean that the banned person can't speak somewhere else. Everyone has a right to moderate their private property which includes digital space. Although banned from Twitter and some other platforms, Trump didn't lose his freedom of speech. He can say whatever he wants. It's just that he will need an alternative way to reach a big audience because major companies specializing in providing big audiences don't want to provide him their services.

This seems like a fairly antiquated view that does not map well to the current era or actual definition of censorship (A cursory internet search will help to better inform you as to what censorship entails and what actions may reside within the purview of censorship).

One does not have to prosecuted by the government in order to have their speech censored, access to a public forum revoked, or have their livelihood and career threatened.

There are things you simply cannot say within our society due the fact that they are deemed subversive or improper. This arbitrary ability to ascribe these labels to speech and thereby limit its reach and punish those who speak it is the very abuse of power that is characterized as "censorship".

A government is one institution that concentrates power that can be a censor, but in modern times there are alternative organizational structures that are both powerful and global that can perform the act of "censorship".

> This seems like a fairly antiquated view that does not map well to the current era It very well could be. I grew up in Croatia, I was born right after Yugoslavia fell apart together with its communist regime, so I might be biased towards what I've heard about those times from older members of my family, my history classes, interaction with peers from both Croatia and other ex-communist countries in Europe through youth exchanges, etc, although I was lucky enough to be born in the right time to not live during that period. I'm pretty sure that my views on censorship, free markets, government intervetion, etc. were shaped by my environment. So every time that I read someone claiming that what we see in the US right now is censorship what comes to my mind is that people in Europe during communism would be happy if if was like that during their times.

Well it is also important to note that censorship is a continuous variable. Censorship can gradually increase over time, and what many people in the US are observing is that even in the absence of any censorship (Note: I do not think there is an absence of censorship), the mechanisms for application of censorship are becoming evermore potent.

Think of it in the language of physics. Regardless of the "Kinetic Energy" of censorship, the "Potential Energy" for censorship in is the US with concentrated power to decide who can say what and effectively remove people from public life and discourse is likely far greater than existed in a country like Croatia (which you believe to have had far greater "Kinetic Energy" than the US has).

The man just incited an insurrection against Congress. This wasn't a hard decision.

Apparently it was a hard decision cause they only suspended him for 12 hours initially.

When /r/the_donald got booted off reddit they got together and created https://thedonald.win/.

All this action from twitter will do is create an opportunity for a different or new site to host trump's comments. And for many people, and maybe someday the majority of people, that new site may be more trustworthy than twitter.

Do you think they are not aware of that ? I think that they know and they think it's insignificant.

Good. Kick him of off the more popular platform and let him rot in the dirty corners of the internet. He and his followers can spew their racism all they want in some dirty unmoderated space where I and my friends don’t have to suffer for it.

If they then use that platform to plan something dangerous and illegal, a competent law enforcement should be able to stop it and arrest them on grounds of conspiracy or hate speech.

How did the existence of his account on Twitter lead you and your friends to suffer? Can't you just block that account?

> If they then use that platform to plan something dangerous and illegal, a competent law enforcement should be able to stop it and arrest them on grounds of conspiracy or hate speech.

The same could be said if the account remained on Twitter. In fact, one could argue that's better platform for law enforcement to take action.

The harm is in exposing this toxic and racist rhetoric to my friends and family. This can be a) insulting and b) incite people we’re close to repeat and extend on this rhetoric. The further he is from the popular platform the less likely it is to happen to those close to me.

The popular platforms are full of dog whistles and memeified hate speech as people moderate them self in order to make the content more palatable for the general public and prevent being kicked of the platform. In an unmoderated dark corner of the internet that is not necessary. So arguable twitter is a terrible place for law enforcement to hunt down racists and prevent their terrorism.

This is how news networks like fox news become #1.

The channel with an average of 3 million viewers at peak times? Cable news is not big. There are YouTubers I've never heard of who do a multiple of that on their videos. Don't mistake noise for influence.

How many live youtube or twitch channels have 3 million viewers?

Yes, the best way to build trust is to act as a megaphone for Donald Trump.

Nope. They will never police themselves to the extent that they had too on reddit. Anyone stumbling into them who wasn't already heavily inclined to their cause will bounce off from the sheer nastiness of the place.

Being on reddit forced them to tone down and memeify to the point where they were kinda entertaining in the beginning, that's what drew a lot of people in. thedonald.win will end up like another infowars or 4chan, that weird corner of the internet you visit occasionally to look at the weirdness but mostly avoid.

How exactly is TheDonald.win "sheer nasty"? Give some examples. I've perused that site and there's a lot of outrage at how the President has been treated, true, but I don't see much nasty.

Then again, free speech can seem ugly, when you're used to a carefully curated kind of controlled speech.

Well I'd go check but the site seems to be down.

Perhaps "nasty" is the wrong word, although I do think there's an element of that. More "delusional"? That is, so divorced from what I perceive as reality that anyone not already on that path is going to be utterly confused by what people there believe, like the other conspiracy-esque sites out there.

It's not down. You do have to pass a captcha because all the crazies are targeting the site.

It's back, as of 7:31 EST, and no captcha. But it's still very slow. But so is hacker news, at least for me.

EDIT: oops, it's down at 7:33. I guess the landing page is up, but clicking on a discussion sends me back to a Cloudflare gateway timeout page.

Search for BLM and go through pages 25 through 30. I found multiple comments/posts calling or implying violence against left-leaning politics and black people.

https://thedonald.win/p/11RhTd8i71/by-morning-twitter-will-c...

Enough said.

Having massive followings on fringe sites yields less legitimacy then having a massive following on one of the mainstays of the internet.

Didn't they create that website before they got banned?

Yes, long before. /r/t_d was pretty much dead at the point it was banned and the ban was pretty meaningless. Reddit gave them plenty of warnings that made it easy for them to figure out what was going to happen, since they've decided to ignore those warnings.

Not the case with /r/donaldtrump, which was banned a day or two ago.

I think twitter needed to do this far sooner, they showed that some people are held to different standards and allowed to break the rules. Someone followed religiously by half the country is not just going to go away. Gab is going to have massive growth now, and will further increase the divide between left and right viewpoints. This is not something to celebrate.

global communications platforms should allow all legal posts. this is dumb precedent and these 2 tweets are pretty tame

What happens when two countries' laws conflict with one another?

Don't like it? Build your own Twitter.

Don't like it? Build your own Payment Processor.

Don't like it? Build your own Aeroplane.

Don't like it? Build your own uh.........government?

This is how it works since forever, either build your own or take over control to force it to change.

> Don't like it? Build your own uh.........government?

It's been done before. I think the IPO was in 1776.

"Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing... After all possibilities have been exhausted"

- Somebody that's not Winston Churchill

I see that people are complaining it's too little, too late. But c'mon, there's a certain amount of appreciation due, isn't there?

Not only that, the account could have done worse in the coming weeks - so it's better to be late than never.

It seems cowardly to me to use force to shut people down. But it's a free country and they own their platform, so i think it should be allowed. I just think it will allow for more competition for Twitter.

Weird they quote the tweets which are so 'dangerous'

In isolation they aren't. Immediately following the quoted tweets they explain:

"Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks."

They then explain exactly what they're thinking about those tweets.

> In isolation they aren't

Hold on there, we're still talking about Twitter, right?

A content business that limits the length of a statement on its platform to 280 characters is now arguing that statements on its platform must be read in a broader context?

Seriously?

This is wrong. This is not the way we want to go forward.

We have laws and courts to prosecute illegality.

It is urgent we translate the principle of Free Speech, from the country in which these platforms were founded, into an online context.

>Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open.

What about the people who can never make it to elected office because their communication channels are nuked for WrongThink before their political lives can even get off the ground.

Do we want the realm of acceptable discourse set by an insular group with radical ideas?

I hope there's broad agreement the answer to that is no, even from those who see themselves at present mostly in line with the small group with radical ideas.

"It's a private business they can do what they want" is outdated thinking to address these issues.

I don't currently have the all the answers here.

But I do know we need answers to this problem.

I am no trump fan, but reading the two tweets that got him suspended confuses me. Neither of those two tweets encourages violence in any way. What am i missing? The two listed tweets are:

   “The 75,000,000 great American
   Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA
   FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT
   AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE
   long into the future. They will
   not be disrespected or treated
   unfairly in any way, shape or
   form!!!”

and

   “To all of those who have asked,
   I will not be going to the
   Inauguration on January 20th.”

So where do those encourage violence? First one lists how many people voted for him, and his idea that they support the country more than those who did not. Asinine, but not more inflammatory than most politicians say. The second is an answer to a question many have been asking. Also pretty harmless. Honestly, what am I missing?

It seems to me people are just itching for a reason to justify doing what they want. Lots of people hate trump even in this thread and are happy with censoring of people they dont like, just because they dont like them. It's rather chilling to see.

yes, this is exactly the way it is. most people are perfectly fine with throwing their ideals out of the window if they were applicable to people they don't like.

Big tech wants to control who's able to speak, that's all. This whole thing will end up swallowing us all. You'll see.

That's just an excuse. I suspect the actual reason for banning him is for hundreds of tweets he made during the last four years for which a normal user would be banned, but he was protected against banning for "public interest" (read: additional traffic to Twitter). These two tweets are just a lame excuse. It would be better if they were honest about the reasons for the ban. But let's be real - no matter what he tweeted now at the end of his presidency he would be banned on Jan 20th. They just sped up the decision a little bit because of what happened few days ago.

Capitol Police open the doors to the U.S. Capitol for the protestors. One officer is heard saying, “I disagree with it, but respect it.”

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1347615998610911234?s=...

Wouldn’t this create more tension by the violent rioters taking it as an offensive to the president by the left?

That'd be one more putsch instead of as many as Trump can whip up from Twitter.

If the decision was based on logical rules they would have done it before. So it’s clearly political. Glad to know that the most influential social networks are not neutral at all despite saying so.

Have you turned on the news this week? It wasn’t the same as what was on last week.

Their rationale is so bankrupt it doesn’t even deserve to be argued. What a sad day for freedom of expression.

This thread right here is proof HN is no better than Reddit or any other social media forum people try to claim it is. The amount of rage and hatred being expressed here is just sad.

What good does Twitter do for society? Is it pure entertainment? That's all news is for most people. There is little to no actionable intelligence in nearly all stories we read. I don't think we would let evil inc in the stock market. Isn't there rules about businesses whose main selling point is access to foreign demoralization forces? People's brains are scrambled. Every time I leave twitter I feel stupider for reading it.

Pretty cynical of Twitter to monetize his tweets with gay abandon and then shut down his account now that he's politically weak and has indicated he's not going to run for a second term. The specific violations they have cited are very mild in comparison to many other tweets in the past. Ditto for Facebook. I suppose they feel like they can strike with impunity now these people are going to be shown the door.

The justification they give is ridiculous.

I still use RSS. It doesn't matter how much effort twitter makes. The simple reality is that you cant have a middle man in one-to-many communication. Its just not possible for their agenda to align perfectly with yours - or anyones. You can use twitter if you can make your agenda fit theirs (which is a moving target) and twitter can have plenty of users by adapting their agenda to its users (which are a bazillion moving targets) - good luck with that! One would have to be rather ignorant, a person docile enough to realistically anticipate any and all future contexts doesn't exist. Twitter is trying really hard to make it work - but it cant! I remember people who build their organization on google wave, on google knol and on yahoo groups. I build a reasonably large community on yahoo 360 and we tried to move to WordPress. (you can laugh, it's okay) I've used up all of my ignorance. I like RSS the way I like email and bittorrent. You can down vote me but to shut me up would require a good few days in court. We could just do discussion in stead and I might learn something.

The problem with these FB & Twitter bans is its easy to creat a new social media platform, esp if you can get exclusives like this. The main reason I joined twitter (and tiktok) is because I saw so many sites and newspapers with the links and watermarks. If Parlor or what ever site does host trump it quickly becomes a new app you should get, it doesn't shut him down, there will be fewer controls.

That's the beauty of the free markets. You can always compete. The problem is that alternative social networks such as Parler don't have wide enough audience as Twitter. But that's also an effect of the free market. If there were enough people who value having access to the kind of content which can be found on Parler then it would be more popular. Twitter is simply catering to the majority of consumers.

The market interest for networks like Parler, Gab, Voat, Thedonald.win, etc. is simply too small for any of them to succeed. Their audience is also too narrow, it's just politics and almost no discussion about anything else. If a ton of people would suddenly move to Parler it would mean the majority wants it and Twitter would respond by enabling the kind of content they are banning now.

One thing that’s scary is that his whole history of tweets has been completely been made unaccessible.

It’s hard to imagine how much web embed/linked those tweets.

I'd been thinking about that too, when people were speculating the account would be nuked Jan 20.

It's quite bizarre the situation we find ourselves in, the way these sort of primary historical documents exist at the whims of certain organizations, not to mention the strict ideological alignment of these organizations.

Future historians I'm sure would greatly appreciate if someone started version controlling the web.

And people presently alive would probably appreciate it if we could socially work out a way to have communication channels, our ability to exchange information and understand the recent past not under this sort of autocratic control.

This goes well past DJT. It would be nice if people, no matter their feelings about Trump, could understand the gravity of this.

My shock and disturbance at seeing this is equal to what we saw at the capitol.

I think DT helped resurrect Twitter from irrelevance. Which is why they tolerated him for so long.

Now that he is past his usefulness, they decided to suspend him.

Four years too late. Maybe even more.

If no tv network will carry his remarks live, and no social network will give him a posting account, then he has no way of communicating with the American people and it seems pretty difficult to make the case that he is able to carry out his duties.

So I guess what I'm saying is: invoke the 25th amendment because he got kicked of Twitter.

Several presidents managed before Twitter, TV, or electricity.

It was a joke.

If no tv network will carry his remarks...

Please, God, let it be so. Every time I talk to my parents I have to hear about and respond to the latest outrage as reported by CNN and MSNBC. "Mom, they're just winding you up." "No Dad, that doesn't actually seem so important." Good grief.

Good move by Twitter.

Members of congress were almost taken hostage because an obviously lying autocrat wanted to overturn a fair election, and people in this thread are wringing their hands over it.

Free speech is to protect people from autocratic governments, not private enterprises. Private companies can choose how they handle speech as they wish.

Say what you will about the motivations and justification, but it's got to take some courage to make a policy decision that wipes 1.5 Billion off your market cap in an hour:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/

Easy to apply these policies only now that he lost the election.

I wish to remind everyone citing 1st Amendment that Jack Dorsey of the Twitter Party was not elected to Congress.

Yep, it's a great loophole to the 1A. Just move all public squares to the internet where voices can be censored with impunity by private corporations. Bonus points if your particular tech platform favors one political party. That way you technically aren't violating 1A, but the party you are buddies with get to benefit from the same net result.

If that platform mentions in its TOS that "We hereby reserve the right to rescind your access to the platform if you talk shit about our corporate overlords or favorite political party", then I have no problem with it.

This is not the case today.

The stated reason for banning Trump today was: he stated he wouldn't attend Biden's inauguration and that that was deemed "glorification of violence". How is that not completely arbitrary?

Are they going to ban Arthur Chu? https://cdn.cnsnews.com/styles/article_big/s3/2021-01/Arthur...

After reading the reasoning, I'm afraid to tweet how I really feel about things now. (seriously.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

"He's done worse before, why now?" is not a very strong argument IMO. Are we better off without him on twitter? IMO, yes. Then this is a positive move. I also think Twitter/Facebook should have clear guidelines for intolerable content that applies to everyone. Encouraging violence could be a good red line. Although, I have little confidence that any of the social media platforms would establish and equally enforce a standard policy. They usually take the path of least business risk which is understandable but not satisfying.

Ben Thompson has a nuanced piece on this:

https://stratechery.com/2021/trump-and-twitter/

Sigh, now that idiot-in-chief has been banned, who am I going to use as a proof that Twitter is a garbage fire and anything said there should be treated with contempt?

(Rhetorical question, please don't answer.)

I was opposed to banning anyone anywhere, public or private, until Wednesday. He inspired a mob that threatened two Vice Presidents and the entire legislative branch. Guns and bombs were found at the capitol. People had zip ties, seemingly wanting to take hostages. This is yelling fire in a crowded theater, plus Twitter can do what they want on their platform. No sympathy here. We'll see what the repercussions of this are, but its not hard to understand the reasoning. Don't be tone deaf.

Regardless of how timely (way too late???) this moderation decision is, I cannot help but feel like the social media giants have decided that they have milked this cash-cow dry and now they want to make a show of "discretion" and "responsibility" to appease the incoming powers-that-be....

Ultimately I remain convinced that the only sane way forwards is via decentralized services like https://joinmastodon.org/.

Meanwhile Twitter lets neocon and natsec goons advocate for all kinds of policies that would kill 100,000x as many people as died on Wednesday with no consequences whatsoever ....

As a result of the tweet deletions, actually the only thing I've seen/heard Trump say about it is 'stay peaceful', 'go home', etc . I only have secondary and tertiary sources for his inciting violence.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying their veracity, I just think it's interesting.

I think overall my opinion is 'it's up to Twitter what's on Twitter, whatever' - but also that personally I like its 'this claim is disputed' etc. banners, but I think the outright removals that destroy the record, break news articles, etc. are a shame.

Couldn't the more egregious stuff just be more like HN's greyscale demotion and 'showdead'? '¡This tweet contains false information, appears designed to incite violence! <Show>'? Sort of like 'some viewers may find the following scenes distressing'.

I’m not trying to give Twitter a pass for the years they spent doing little...but...they are just people. Just a crew of nerdy tech folks showing up to work trying to balance freedom and safety (and profit), without much direct precedent.

If I was in their shoes, I’m not sure I would’ve been more effective.

This situation will be studied for decades as an example of what to do and hopefully the folks running into this situation next time will be more equipped to respond well.

I think one has to consider this event not as an isolated decision based on two tweets, but a series of events that have escalated over time. Just like Twitter can decide to give everyone, even those whose opinions we don’t like, (as they are a private enterprise) a voice, they can also decide to cut short those that go too far. I welcome the decision, but I also tend to agree with those saying it’s “too little too late”.

Now I realize the importance of open standards and protocols. The beauty of email. I wish there was something like that for twitter

Funny, there is « /2020 » in the blog link.

Why not every other politician? They are all the same.

Let us just go a small step further and let facebook and twitter choose the next presidents.

One could make a fairly good argument they already do.

Especially if you watched the testimony from that professor explaining how Google shifts search results to push GOTV in certain distinct counties while excluding others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSTHgoaVtSw

> Why not every other politician? They are all the same.

Please elaborate.

The cyberpunk future is here - a giant corporation that doesn't even make money is censoring the sitting president.

All we can do is laugh.

A suspension also means a deletion of the entire history and exactly that part is worrisome to me. The archive is gone.

How are future generation going to believe that this man actually contradicted himself so, so, so many times?

Edit: Ah nevermind: https://www.thetrumparchive.com/

4 years of fascism and inciting violence is all it took. This is far too little too late and Twitter is clearly complicit.

Consider yourself lucky that you have absolutely no idea what fascism looks like.

At the beginning? Exactly like this.

Rewind a little more and just about anything is what fascism looks like “at the beginning”.

I wouldn't go so far as to call Twitter Fascist. Authoritarian and repressive, perhaps, but their ideology is pretty different.

I think he called Trump facist

Perhaps my sarcasm was not obvious enough.

I have real trouble spotting non-phonetic sarcasm

Hitler owned a dog.

Yeah. We should have started crushing the alt-right years ago, honestly. It's pretty sad how smart people get sucked into these conspiracies and start following dear leader so quickly.

Can we not say the same of the Alt-Left too? Well over 100+ days of violence and destruction in major cities across the country... that's not acceptable either.

At the extremes, both sides are the same.

It is notable, however, that we did see 100+ days of political violence from the Alt-Left, billed as "Mostly Peaceful Protests", and a singular event from the Alt-Right and the entire country is up in arms.

If we care about one, we must care about the other with equal vigor.

Political violence is never okay, even if it is your side.

I am all for giving everyone in the right, a number tattoo so we can keep them under control, and maybe put them in specific locations around US and the world so their influence in a normal and joyous society won't be a problem for us common folks.

What do you think?

Oh yay, a totally obvious "tattoo the jews" comment. The nazis are on the alt-right side, buddy.

Good point - We'll go for a FDR style internment camps instead.

Who? The guy who followed the laws, albeit creatively? Or the mob that is canceling diverse thoughts on imputed pretexts?

The official east German name for the Berlin Wall was "Antifaschistischer Schutzwall". This is what communism looks like. Call anything and everything you don't like fascist, and use the scaremongering to instate tyranny.

And your comment is better? Yet another person calling everything more left than the middle communist.

People really have no clue what communism is, astounding.

It looks like a thug on the floor of the senate with zip ties in hand, and we’ve seen it.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zip-cuffs-capitol-riots/

Not sure why you're being downvoted....

Said the frog in the slowly warming water.

Wasn't the brain removed in that classic frog and boiling water experiment?

Agreed that it's too little too late but calling Twitter "complicit" is pretty ridiculous.

Fascism? Hardly.

As Trump is the President of the United States, knowing what he says is in the public's interest - until the end which is reached nowadays.

That's why this action happened now and not much earlier.

I actually agree, and I upvoted you because I think this is worth discussion.

My question here though is: does blocking Trump from Twitter really equate to blocking the public from hearing what he's saying? As someone who doesn't use and never really 'got' Twitter it's really hard for me to take Twitter that seriously. Aren't there myriad other and better ways for the president to reach more people? (Note that only a small-ish minority of U.S. adults even use Twitter at all)

Social networks are much more informal than the other tools at the disposal of a president, unlike press releases or conferences. They can also be diffused widely and in a very short amount of time.

(but then the question is? is that a good thing? or having a failsafe as a good press secretary is a better idea, even if we get to know less about what a politician really thinks)

No one here could honestly hold the position that Donald Trump is somehow silenced by this, but you'll note how many people are willing to contort themselves around this and other lies.

As pointed out elsewhere, he is the President of the US and all that entails, he has plenty of ways to get his message out including even the official @POTUS twitter account.

Just more dishonest nonsense that we have to wade through.

That's an interesting point about @POTUS. I wonder if they would still let him use it, and if he had already been using it if they would have blocked that, too.

He actually put out a few tweets with this account, which were deleted again.

I don't remember everything, but he was talking about an announcement of some kind of an alternative.

Sounded to me like he's planning to build his own platform.

But still, the action happened on political basis. This feels something I used see happening in Eastern Block or USSR some 40 years ago.

I don't directly disagree and I feel kind of weird about this too, but the idea that a private company could have been 1) big enough to matter and 2) blocked the head of the government from using the service without literal heads rolling in USSR 40 years ago doesn't match with my understanding of that era.

Actually if Twitter were silently forced to not only carry the president's message but also boost it to everyone's feed and secretly silence his opponents that feels more USSR to me, and feels like almost the opposite of what's happening here.

I don't think you know what the 4th word of your own sentence really means to the context of this situation.

Parler, Trump’s logical next step after Twitter, has just been removed from the Play Store.

There’s a level of co-ordination at play here that should be worrying to people who care about freedom of speech.

And before some idiot tells me that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies, I’m not making a legal point here, I’m making a moral one.

I'm a leftist european who despises Trump, still have to agree with you.

This is interesting.

The deplatforming of Trump by left leaning tech companies creates a new platform that threatens all other platforms.

Is this the first deplatforming that will result in deplatforming of the original platform?

As the right flocks else where the left has no one to fight with. The places becomes a real echo chamber with a large drop in usuage.

This will be used to justify escalation.

This HN article, the Twitter blog page that it points to, all of these comments, and all linked related URLs and news stories surrounding this --

NEED TO BE PRESERVED FOR FUTURE HISTORIANS

I repeat...

All of this:

NEEDS TO BE PRESERVED FOR FUTURE HISTORIANS

In other words, don't let the fake news (or whomever else) horseshit you about what happened at this point of time in earth's history 5, 10, or 20+ years from now, when all of this information "conveniently" goes missing...

THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME IN EARTH'S HISTORY

I don't care what side of the debate you are on; all I ask is that if you care, if you truly care, then capture and store as much information as you can about this event as you can, from your side, from the other side, from all sides...

IT IS AN IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME IN EARTH'S HISTORY.

Don't let this information, all of it, or any of it, go into future memory sinkholes...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole

On behalf of myself and future historians, I (and they!) thank you!

We now return you to your regular HN reading and commenting. <g>

Well, the US has been a corporate oligopoly for a long time now. I guess we might as well make it official.

I realize that trump is odious, but, what is next? Be inspired by China and filter wrongthink from the internet itself? What’s after that? Search for the wrong thing and the police kick down your door and disappear you? WTF is wrong with these tech clowns? Read a few history books.

Every time I walk past the twitter building I think about how the people in that building enabled this guy

It's a victory for private platforms when they grow a backbone, stop hiding behind the cowardly cries of "but free speech!", and use principles and morals to drive action. Twitter has bent over backwards _not_ to ban this person. It's been a long time coming.

I support this ban.

I’m a physician. In addition to this president inciting a riot, this president and his supporters are complicit in using social media to promote unscientific, self-serving views that strike at the health of my patients and adversely affect American healthcare in general.

Enough is enough.

Thank god we have unelected billionaires telling the proletariat what it is safe for them to read.

It took two years to go from banning Alex Jones to banning of the President of the United States.

Some slopes really are slippery. Everyone cheering for this censorship from billionaire elites while claiming to be part of resistance doesn't know what's coming for them.

Very opportunistic of Twitter to ban him now... after all that has been said. Politics aside, violations of said framework should be held accountable when it occurs, not in post review. No one has special treatment. At least they shouldn’t.

The downside is that we won’t be able to see his tweets about being banned from Twitter.

Twitter waited just long enough, to finish profiting off the last 4 years of rage from him, to finally do something.

I have lost all faith in Twitter leadership and engineering to have allowed this to get to this point for pure greed reasons.

I haven't decided yet if I agree with it or not, to be honest. Not for this particular case but in general, as a banning policy. In the meanwhile, though, I enjoy the thought of him being so pissed for being banned.

Finally, this has been years coming. This was absolutely the right thing to do.

In Australia for decades we've had laws that prevent one person from owning a majority of newspapers and TV stations in a city. It was supported by many left-wing people because it prevented Rupert Murdoch from dominating the media landscape.

Now days such people defend the dominance of Twitter because it is using its power in a way that they agree with. Is that a double-standard?

honestly, good riddance. you can argue the merits of all this stuff "intellectually" about free speech and what not, but it doesn't pass the sniff test. and twitter is a private enterprise. he's free to go off to parler or whatever and take the millions of followers with him.

this entire thing is just an extension of the type of shit you get real tired of in daily life. like some bully repeatedly antagonizing you and when you finally fight back they claim persecution.

like the key and peele skit... no, you're no persecuted, you're just an asshole.

The medium is the message - this chaos is a consequence of the hyper-centralized communication platforms, which are hiding this by pointing the moral finger at their participants to blame and censor them.

May I suggest a simple remedy? The President can start a blog on whitehouse.gov and join the Fediverse [1].

[1]: https://fediverse.party/

I'm sure most people here know this, but https://www.thetrumparchive.com is where all his (past) tweets are at.

A very modern book burning.

Honestly, I'm more interested in what kind of precedent this will set. I mean, a social platform censoring the president, and more so, banning it. We're living in interesting times.

I can't justify and support these actions in the past few days. It's time for us to opt-out of these scuffles. There exists the middle. Resist the temptation to join either side.

Maybe he has twitted worse things before but the ban has to be evaluated in context. Which is worse, lighting a bonfire on a dessert dune or lighting a match on top of a powder keg?

I don't have a horse in the game - but I feel this will only deepen the divide in US politics. Trump and his followers aren't going to disappear. They will be even more isolated in a new site/app they setup and without this level of public scrutiny. This is an impossible position for Twitter either way.

He still has access to the @POTUS account until the 20th though.

reminds me of 911 when they took an act they had always wanted to do (patriot act) and used the circumstances to crack down on individual freedoms.

this will be the last time i use twitter

If Twitter would be my company I would have banned him earlier.

He was already in the process of ditching Twitter for a right wing platform. Twitter dragged their feet for so long because they didn’t want a competitive platform to take his audience. This isn’t Twitter suddenly finding their morals, they have little to lose now that he is moving on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

Tech companies shouldn't be the ones policing.

The good thing I see though is, that he can't "enrich" himself from the followers gained as a president.

People are going to be falling over themselves to get him a medium to write on. He could set one up himself and cash in. @RDT media empire here we come.

Twitter has been agonizing for years. They just give no excuse to millions to keep using their service. They are not Facebook, so, they don't have the same luxury Facebook has - keeping all your pictures, videos, and posts a hostage. I think Indieweb is more relevant today than it ever has been! Also, Twitter boosted its competitor Parler today better than ever. By Google Play blocking Parler, millions will learn how to install Android apps outside of their store and many conservatives will leave iOS for Android for this ability alone!

There is something that yesterday happened and will go into history, US is not a democracy, is a country run by Banks and yesterday the second power came into place and without shame exposed their identify: Big Tech. In any other country with political instability the Stock Market would crash. Today another day of unprecedented earnings mainly in Tech. They have the power to censor the most powerful man on Earth, a person that was elected according to the US constitution and laws. We need legislation to break and moderate this companies

Let me take the (probably extremely unpopular) position of saying this a really coward move by Twitter. I get it, they don't like Trump, and who could blame them for it. But Trump has said and tweeted far worse stuff than what Twitter now sees as cause for suspension.

The reality is that Twitter didn't want to silence him as long as he was still president for political and business reasons. Now that it's clear his chances for a 2nd term have gone to 0, they just have no more backlash to fear. Those two tweets as reason for the suspension is a blatant farce.

So, sorry Twitter, I'm not buying it. To be credible you should have suspended the guy much earlier. Let the downvotes begin!

I hate the left right and center. The hypocrisy everywhere and all institutions. But i love my family friends and never censored with them

Of all the things he's tweeted that skirted or crossed over their policy rules, these are the two that get him banned?

Twitter pulling the string on the money sack and pretending like they care. Thanks for all the impressions orange one, good luck.

i'm not surprised, Democrats are in power, you're going to see a purge throughout all the platforms since most align with the Left politically and now they have cover.

It will be interesting to see if there's a "we welcome different views because our new inclusive culture" platform movement when the power swings back to Republican party.

Just a thought, with a cult like following he has, he can easily start a new "twitter" and have a massive following.

The owners of Gab must be salivating. They said they want him. If he goes, all his followers will too.

Am I the only one who feels a shadowban would've been more effective?

He can shout all he wants into his own personal echo chamber.

It would have helped, IMO, had Twitter banned the account with a statement to the effect of, "With hindsight, we should have done this a couple of days ago when, while ostensibly telling his supporters to go home, Mr Trump actually restated his lies with respect to his 'landslide victory' being stolen, and then flattering the mob he incited by calling them patriots who were loved."

The recent tweets are nothing compared with those before the Capitol invasion, and during it. Twitter should present them all in a timeline, for clarity and for history.

Tough situation for Twitter to be in, since they are now effectively making a judgement that every other world leaders tweets are OK. IMO they should have banned him on Wednesday, and justified it by saying he incited the riot. Banning him because the latest tweets can be interpreted as inciting violence in the future is a lot harder to consistently apply, especially since my reading of the latest tweets doesn't really seem like they are inciting violence at all.

Not sure how you can ban Trump, and then allow leaders like Khamenei to stay on the platform.

Unfair moderation is not a good precedent.

I mean it's only unfair in that anyone else who has continuously violated twitter's rules would've been banned long ago.

You can take the mask off and just say you’re a Trump supporter.

Anyone else who would’ve tweeted the things he has for the past several years would’ve been banned a long time ago.

It would've been so much easier to justify yesterday. Twitter always seems to be behind on these decisions.

This is an outrage, on par with if Fox News were to dictate which people were allowed to speak on its airwaves

Now that the king of rage bait is gone will we will see engagement and revenue drop?

Or has that slack been taken up by Bitcoin?

To quote the ACLU: the Ayatollah can tweet, but the U. S. President cannot. Good luck walking that fine line.

Like others in this thread, I'm worried about the extremely weak way this is presented. The deleted video where he outright lies about having won and even says "we love you" to the rioters would have been far, far more appropriate.

Now Trump supporters will focus on to this (which, it pains me to say, is kinda fair) and all hope of a more nuanced discussion of the much more valid reasons is out the window.

sigh You'd imagine a company the size and importance of Twitter would have someone there to do a half decent job of this...

A question to consider is that the courts found @realDonaldTrump was official government communication a couple of years ago. As such is it appropriate that a private company can shut it down?

> After assessing the language in these Tweets against our Glorification of Violence policy, we have determined that these Tweets are in violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy and the user @realDonaldTrump should be immediately permanently suspended from the service.

Wow, if that's not an example of arbitrary use of ToS, I don't know what is. In no way were the two tweets listed "glorification of violence". I don't like DJT and didn't vote for him, but... what a farce, what a travesty.

This wasn't just Trump's account. Many major conservative accounts are getting nuked. This was an incredibly poor decision and will lead to absolute chaos. Stay safe folks.

Good.

I've always tried to maintain a nuanced view of Twitter (and other socials) for keeping his account up. He's POTUS after-all. People saying Twitter should just shut him down because he incites, are, in my view, correct. Mentally however, I could never quite square the argument; I kept returning to `he's POTUS`. Social networks deserve much criticism, but those only criticizing social networks overlook the fact that there is a legislative body that has always been empowered to remove him, whose duty in fact is to be a check on him. The primary blame for him retaining his power must primarily lay at their feet, specifically those of the President's party. They thought they could ride the bull but they have finally been thrown off of it. Now they are seeking to distance themselves from the bull. I am sorry, but they should not be able to. Had they been forthright with their supporters and stuck to their views of Trump before he was president, we might have avoided all of this.

In a better world, Congress would have acted and those who were trying to cynically benefit from Trump should have had the fortitude to call him out immediately and removed him.

I don't disagree that Twitter should have acted sooner. As others have pointed out, their timing is much too late. They acted after Trump has been legislatively defanged. Still, Trump is dangerous, we're just fortunate he's an incompetent buffoon who is disinterest in the actual minutiae of the job. He should resign immediately. He won't. He should be removed by his cabinet or Congress as soon as possible.

Included in Twitter’s statement, explaining why it banned Trump: “Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.” https://twitter.com/geoffrbennett/status/1347696690841739267...

this in itself is a dangerous precedent for censorship at the request of the twitter management.

Does anyone have an archive of the tweets? As this is a historical loss if the content is gone.

There are many, internet archive, reddit bots, @POTUS account archive hosted by us.gov. I even have a personal archive. Don't you worry.

I was just thinking how refreshing that HN was free of US politics, until I saw this. Oh well.

This might be an extremely unpopular thing to say, and should be obvious to the Secret Service, but obvious security threats have recently been less obvious to security officials, so here it is:

Please triple or quadruple the detail that protects Trump. Put him in a safe bunker if you have to. Please, please, please don't let anything happen to him right now.

Please do what it takes to let things cool off. We've got to get the temperature a safe distance from critical.

Finally. Should have happened five years ago.

I deleted all my tweets years ago and now just have a zombie account to keep my username until Twitter disappears into oblivion where it belongs. I encourage you to reward their fecklessness by doing the same.

https://tweetdelete.net/

Revenge ban.

This will hit them back hard in 4 yrs.

Censorship. Free speech. No american again should use these words for other countries.

Can you hack into his Rolls Royce? It should have better wind shield than expected.

To all those saying that this account should not be suspended because a president's messages should not be blocked, Twitter did not ban @POTUS, only @realDonaldTrump. The office of the president is not silenced, only the personal account of the current president. If something important comes up he can tweet via @POTUS (for another 12 days or so, anyway).

Two extremes of takes here on HN. Either it's "too little too late" or "i don't like unelected tech leaders having the power to deplatform POTUS". The reality is somewhere in the messy middle.

If you distance yourself from the blow-by-blow and look at the chronology like a historian might, though, it is really hard to escape the fact that the social media platforms are dumping Trump days before Biden takes over. They profited from him sowing discord, and didn't even bother to finesse the exit.

I also am concerned about the long term damage of Trump leaving office continuing to claim the election was stolen. For the next couple decades there will be millions of Americans absolutely convinced that their government is taken over by a massive conspiracy against Trump. These people will put up more protests and violence in future. this is something that cannot be stamped out - Trump has to be convinced or cornered into reversing his stance publicly. That is the only way.

Alternatively they may have believed they ought to respect the office of the president even if they hated the man in it. And they did right up until the storming of the capitol when they realised there was no amount of damage he wasn't willing to do.

Usually posts with this many upvotes stay on the HN front page much longer.

This action makes twitter seem a lot more significant than it probably is.

Not showing to previous tweets of this account is really bad for history.

I know it's a bad thread to raise the issue, because everyone is so focused on Trump. But forget about Trump for a minute.

If I recall correctly, for years all these internet giants — Twitter, Google, FB, etc. — protected themselves from any legal action pretending they are not mass-media, because they don't do any censorship and serve just as a middleman between content providers and consumers. Now, we all know that this obviously wasn't true for at least a couple of years, but we also know that governments are slow and lazy, and it takes some time for them to adjust. So it wasn't that surprising that there was no real consequence.

But over the last year all boundaries were so ridiculously, so mindbogglingly crossed, that I wonder if something has to change now. Or do they really have so much power now, that there's zero reasons to be careful of government?

It's time for real p2p social media. I'm off to tinker.

I wonder how hard it was for them to restrain themselves from citing the debate around section 230 in this.

Because the reality is, this is exactly what 230 would mandate - to a much greater extent and much earlier than it is currently done.

Donald Trump is still president of the US.

He can hold a press conference whenever he wants if he would like to speak to the public.

All of this talk about free speech in regards to the twitter ban is nonsense. Nobody is limiting his ability to address the public (except for perhaps pence and his cabinet).

I'm not a Trump apologist, but I've spent time around his based.

The second and third order effects of this are going to be terrible. You have a large portion of the country that feels disenfranchised, unheard, and forgotten (the rural American working class). This is why Trump got elected, and why the Capitol was stormed.

These people had some hope and felt heard through Trump. Removing him, along with the purge of many other conservatives (they've even banned an account I followed which posted documents on the Flynn case and provide some legal analysis) will serve to worsen this.

I heard the phrase "violence is the language of the unheard" to justify the unrest and rioting this summer; I agree with this statement, and why I fear for the worst.

They've been heard, but it doesn't matter. The people they've chosen to follow keep stoking their feelings of grievance.

One unfortunate side effect of this I see happening is that the big social media companies will crack down use of the platforms for any kind of protest activity, citing incitement to violence.

Probably, but only if the violence doesn't serve them. There will be an undefined but overtly demonstrated acceptable violence. Any words of incitement will be given the most charitable of interpretations.

While I think Trump is completely in the wrong;

He did not tell people to commit their crimes.

It is important to maintain a strict standard here. There are many people who speak of the dangers of fascism, but they are not responsible when antifa riot. There are many who speak of racism, but they (even organization leaders) are not responsible for when BLM protests turn into riots.

What’s happening now is disturbing. Not only Trump but dozens of other accounts have been purged.

Even the Parler app has been removed from the Android store. If it hasn’t been removed from Apple store I am guessing it will be.

The end result is a continued world-view split not only in ideas but in platforms; software and soon hardware?

Why do you think it is specifically relevant to say “He did not tell people to commit their crimes”?

Do you imagine some “correct” process exists for this situation, where Trump would face a trial and conviction for inciting the riot, and then Twitter would be legally be forced to silence him?

No such process exists, and never will, since it would violate the first amendment. Ultimately the decision of when to silence him is left to the judgement of the individuals who operate the platform.

> He did not tell them to commit their crime

When you read the speech he gave and those of the following speakers, I'm not even sure we can say that. He told them to march down Pennsylvania avenue and the next speaker told them they had to fight. It seems to me the math is fairly easy

It's interesting that Gab also banned him.

It takes zero guts to ban a guy who is days away from becoming powerless. They should have done this years ago but were too afraid of retaliation from the White House. Wimps.

It only required over 300,000 Americans to die

Will politicians continue using Twitter et al after this? Seems a bit risky to reach out to their followers using a third-party. Why don’t they have their own website?

Most politicians don't fan the flames of hatred, misinformation and sedition from their Twitter account so they'll be fine.

You don't even need a twitter account when there's blue not matter who culture.

Most politicians really _shouldn't_ be using Twitter in the way Trump was. It's a good tool to connect with your constituents and make short announcements, but he was using it as a sole means of announcing policy and change, including firing people.

Those official communications–anything "from the office of"– should be released through official US Government channels.

Regardless, unless you're planning on inciting a raid on the capitol, you probably won't be banned as a politician. Twitter literally bent over backwards to still allow Trump to use Twitter even though he consistently broke the platform's rules.

You gotta go where the audience is.

I’m not a politician, but I’m guessing: yes.

I don’t see a reason why most mainstream politicians need to distance them self from this platform in light of this. I’m sure most main stream politicians do not associate them self with the type of rhetoric that got Trump kicked form the platform, and are fine with continuing to use it.

Trump had too much power, he either "made" people like that crazy to the bones q shaman guy or made them feel at home. Watch the interviews with him, he has read and believes ever conspiracy theory out there. The mindset of the fringe of these q anon people is what gives isis and all a pool too draw fanatic suicide bombers with a seemingly deactivated brain. Their leaders will drop them like hot potato's when it is opportunistic to do so. I did find some of his old tweets entertaining and funny but his role is not to be a comedian.

This issue is way bigger than Trump.

While many are likely rejoicing that Trump has been silenced, I think this decision is short-sighted and bad for everyone all around. Love him, hate him, Trump is the President of the United States and nobody on either side of the political aisle is going to forget that an unaccountable group of people silenced and censored the President of the United States.

While this may seem like a victory in the short-term, I do not think the power structure in Washington is going to just going to move on after Trump is out.

Not a Trump supporter by any means but this makes me really uncomfortable. Cancel/Deplatform culture is escalating quickly. All is well and good until the tools of oppression turn on you.

Twitter along with Farcebook are making a gesture/paying homage to the the new Regime. Biden is their new King, they must please him to keep Section 230 away....

All theater for the masses....enjoy....

It’s a free country, and that includes the freedom of private business not to do business with anyone they choose for almost any reason. That’s fine with me, and if the Trumpists and their apologists had any consistency, it would be with them too.

There are constraints on commercial discrimination around race and identity. They were painfully negotiated during the civil rights era. Ironically that form of discrimination by a business - separate but equal etc - is probably just fine with the Trumpists.

These social media companies have suddenly found their spine now that the Trump administration had less than two weeks left. Where was that courage when they had something to lose?

This thread has 1491 comments right now but the first page only shows 500. Click “more” at the bottom in case you’re not satisfied.

I disagree with Twitter's decision. I can't give any more comments without risking getting banned myself from HackerNews.

An absolutely terrifying precedent

This is good for the fediverse

Incredibly stupid to ban him at this point. The storming of the Capitol was a dangerous event, but could've been the apex event of the Trump supporters.

The whole movement should've been let to slowly fizzle away - now they've been dealt yet another very public embarrassment and the tug of war will continue.

This has all the chances of becoming a case file for naive interventionism.

Him plus a number of other right wing figures. So is he about to move to parler which is about to be suspended by Apple and Google?

Finally!

I don’t like the argument here. I don’t think these two tweets are inciting violence. I read a lot of ultra-right-wing communities (those who called for bringing arms on the 6th, starting a violent revolution, etc), and both of these tweets were not perceived as a call to arms but rather a depressing confession of defeat.

Think about the second order effect of this one: Trump has lost a big megaphone using which he could have influenced 2024. He has had 4 years to clean up many of the things he has been doing but failed to do so. Kicking him off social media means at-least some of the fence-sitters won't be influenced anymore.

So long, Twitter. You were okay until you started banning people for their beliefs.

As much as I love not having to see Trump on Twitter now.. the future of social media is going to be fully decentralized and distributed (whether we like it or not). The Free World will need a much better immune response to this kind of radicalization than deplatforming people.

Hopefully the future for social media is a quick death. Let’s move on to something a bit more productive

I read both of these tweets just now. I have never read his Twitter posts before, and am not a Trump supporter (or a Democrat supporter; all politicians IMO are liars), but I don't understand how Twitter claims that the text of either of these tweets incites violence.

so what's trumps alternative communication platform?

I agree with Twitter's decision to ban Trump now. He has no effective authority at this point, and is essentially just trolling - and to deadly, if indirect, effect. I also agree with Twitter's decision to keep his while he still wielded meaningful power as a President, despite repeatedly breaking codes of conduct. When he wielded actual power as President, letting the public see his words has value regardless of what those words contained. But now that he's on his way out, they have no more redeeming value.

Critics of this decision often point out that this let Trump magnify his voice and spread harmful messages. I disagree. Trump would have tweeted through some other mechanism. We've already seen analogous applications pop up when social media bans big players - see thedonald.win as an example. Doing this would not accomplish anything in terms of limiting the reach of Trump's messages, and would only serve to further reinforce many conservatives' perceptions of bias in social media.

Too little, too late.

If @realDonaldTrump said all the same things through, let's say, White House press releases, but through Twitter it was relatively "clean" do you think Twitter would've banned it regardless?

I find it funny the number of hackernews users who continue to defend or minimize trump's behavior and actions.

When a comment describing Trump as fascist (he is one) is flagged due to downvotes it's a bit odd.

Fascists hate being called on it, even if we are just a few days after a literal attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power in this country.

Only 5 people died, so I guess small price to pay to massage some folks' egos.

Free speech extremists seriously think a private company should be forced to keep someone who uses their platform to incite deadly riots.

Trump's free speech here has consequences. 5 people have died.

Good riddance.

"The real power is who controls the state of emergency". It is NOT the "most powerful man on earth" (aka POTUS of the US&A).

Read as often as required.

Disclaimer: I am not supporting Trump.

Net Notrality

@realDonaldTrump Archive - https://www.thetrumparchive.com/

Trump is a billionaire and apparently a very successful businessman, I am sure he is free to start his own Twitter alternative and compete with it.

Twitter waited until Friday after 4pm because they know this is horrible for their share price. Trump is their platform's biggest kahuna.

oh how the mighty have fallen

Meanwhile, twitter allows the sockpuppets of a president committing actual genocide (Xi Jinping) to pay freely. So brave!

No justice no peace works both ways

Thank god.

They could have done this at any point but it's the day after Trump concedes and now they decide its the safe play.

Twitter made a lot of money off Trump. This move is 6 months too late. We all pay the price for their greed.

More seriously, why can't we get Trump in front of a doctor who can involuntarily commit him.

Twitter talked past the sale. If they had just said 'We banned this account.' we all would have moved on.

Instead they justified it with some very, very weak and flimsy interpretation of his last posts. I am no Trump supporter and I want him out of office asap, but Twitter managed an unforced error on the simplest layup ever.

World War 3 has started.

I have plenty of karma to spend here.

While I tend to be a caring person, I recognize that some people are so broken that there is no hope for rehabilitation of them. Donald Trump clearly has been trying to seek approval and validation from people forever. Likely this began in his childhood, if accounts of his father's demeanor are to be believed. Also, given his father's characterization as a slum lord, there is little doubt in my mind that this is a family problem that has been passed down for some time; the fathers were mistreated and rejected as children, and likewise they are excessively hard on their children.

Donald Trump has been, likely out of human survival necessity, creating his own fantasy reality in his mind from a very young age. And frankly, with enough self delusion, one can truly believe anything. He appears to truly believe he was cheated, and that he has always been cheated. Ironically, the facts visible from the outside indicate that he is usually the one cheating others ("university" students, debtors, investors, constituents, etc.).

He is doomed, whether by New York State attorneys for his property tax cheats, or perhaps his inflated property sales (foreign money laundering), or other crimes. But more significantly, he is doomed because his character and behavior guarantees that he will never get the satisfaction and confirmation that he has been needing his entire life. It's actually quite sad. But frankly he is old, and he has fucked so many people against their wishes, literally and figuratively, that I have no compassion at this point. Let him burn, or drown in his own misery.

What is more disturbing is the mass of ignorant followers who have thrown their lives and families in turmoil because of him (and because of Fox News and its like). Some of my elder family are in that category. I remember them before this period, and I know they are ultimately good people; but somehow they need a serious readjustment. To use the really tired, annoying expression, they need to become "woke".

Social media better get a grip. It has a very difficult job, because there is no clear line where free speech becomes excessively false rhetoric and disinformation. But it does occur at some point, and it absolutely gets leveraged by groups with agendas. We have ample evidence of how social media has been used at least since 2015 by Russian-related groups to destabilize "democracies" (in quotes now because what was once believe to be a democracy has now been shown to be more of a "democracy as long as it doesn't includes stuff that really bothers us").

I see no easy solution here. The best solution is broader education, more travel and experience, and more connections with people outside our own little bubbles. But that's not going to happen. At this point I'm not willing to bet whether an environmental disaster or a geopolitical disaster will end human life first.

As for Donald Trump, I pity him and wish him to have exactly what he has now. Lots of stolen or debt-forgiven wealth, women who never want him for him, horrible golf skills, and tiny hands. Farewell.

This probably hurts Trump more than the impending impeachment.

Y'know I'm worried this will have the opposite of the intended effect. That it will only embolden them further, so they come back stronger. Also feeds into those liberal stereotypes they endorse.

this is a slippery slope. not wise imo.

Good riddance.

Donald Trump should never have been blocked from Twitter. Where is free speech? Wake up people!

> Donald Trump should never have been blocked from Twitter

Maybe, maybe not. Twitter is free to do what you think they should not.

> Where is free speech?

It's what Twitter exercises when it decides what content and content sources to relay.

Free speech isn't an entitlement to someone else's resources to amplify your speech.

> Maybe, maybe not. Twitter is free to do what you think they should not.

Donald Trump is free to do what you think they should not.

> It's what Twitter exercises when it decides what content and content sources to relay.

And now Twitter is doomed to fail.

> Free speech isn't an entitlement to someone else's resources to amplify your speech.

"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The term "freedom of expression" is sometimes used synonymously but includes any act of seeking, receiving, and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Trump should make a blog.

Violate the terms, get banned. That's fair.

The rest of us are next.

First they came for the narcissistic sociopaths and I said nothing.

> Who's next?

Anyone who violates Twitter's terms and conditions.

Which can be changed by Twitter at any time.

Of course. It would be weird if a company wasn't able to change its own policy.

Joe Biden. Yeah right.

What precedent? That a private company can ban people from posting on their servers. Well, duh.

So you don't support FDA, EPA, Net Neutrality etc?

What does poisoning the rivers or feeding people contaminated food have to do with banning people from Posting on a private forum.

Trumps free to go to parlor or some other right wing dumpster fire.

But Apple just threatened to ban Parler. If you want to play this little charade at least try to keep up.

What charade? I thought capitalists loved capitalism, oh except when your favorite fascist gets thrown off a stupid website.

https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir

Funny, that account isn't banned.

I don't think that a precedent has been set here - Trump's behaviour is unprecedented, and Twitter let him get away with a helluva lot before finally suspending him

Note that accounts such as Iran's Kamenei or those associated with groups in Pakistan, which have called for the destruction of Israel, are not banned

https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir

Yet, Twitter, FB, and YT are quick to censor MEMRI and PalWatch, which actively report on vile speeches around the Arab and Muslim world about how Jews are descended from pigs and dogs, etc., the Holocaust was a hoax, on and on. Because "hate speech". Memri in particular, a non-profit translation service, had hundreds of its videos taken down, footage of these speeches and broadcasts, a valuable resource chopped off for political correctness.

In the early-to-mid 20th century, the phrase politically correct was used to describe strict adherence to a range of ideological orthodoxies within politics. In 1934, the New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct". [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

Here's one from the Chinese Embassy in US that literally supports a genocide.

> Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines. They are more confident and independent. https://t.co/lykDhByEiL

https://twitter.com/ChineseEmbinUS/status/134724760209453465...

They figured out how to market genocide to western audiences

> This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules. Learn more

Sounds like it was deleted or removed?

Tweet per wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20210108010724/https://twitter.c...

Thanks archive.org

Twitter is trying to control politics where they live, that's probably why.

I think this move by Twitter isn’t part of some bigger policy (or if it is, then it is surely just the start.) There are plenty of (worse?) examples that Twitter and Facebook essentially ignored or (maybe mostly Facebook) amplified like in Sri Lanka or Myanmar.

I view this ban as a result of internal politics at Twitter as more people have sided with those employees who don’t like trump (er, basically all of them) and want to replay form him. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s really motivated by self interest given fear of some legislation other than a defence spending bill being passed, but it makes me feel better to imagine that these decisions are the result of careful moral thought and ethical considerations rather than some political calculation or CEO’s journey of self discovery

Imagine thinking this is related.

Yes, I think this is actually it.

After he basically commanded them to "Stop the Steal", I said that Facebook and Twitter would ban him. I also said that nuclear war was also on the table. If he is so unAmerican that he would actually tell his mob to attack the Capitol buildings, he really doesn't care about America at all. Being as petulant as he is, nuclear war is very much on the table. That's how crazy this situation is.

The same thing happened with Gab, which was pushed nearly out of existence after (iirc?) the Tree of Life shooting.

Same line of thinking among officials and POTUS's entourage is being reported (I don't know if the source is reliable) :

> High-ranking national-security officials have spent the last 24 hours scrambling to figure out how to keep their commander-in-chief, Donald Trump, from inciting further violence at home, spilling national secrets, or sparking last-minute confrontations with international foes.

> The concerns in the upper echelons of the administration’s national-security community range from fears inside the Pentagon that the president will do or say something that effectively throws the U.S. into a military confrontation with another country to anxieties in the intelligence apparatus that Trump will divulge classified intelligence on his way out, according to four officials who spoke with The Daily Beast about the matter. All requested to remain anonymous in order to speak more openly about the discussions.

> “This isn’t a hypothetical anymore,” said one senior administration official. “This is real. What happened yesterday changed the calculus. People are concerned about [the president’s] state of mind.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/after-capitol-riot-trump-offic...

If they were really that concerned V.P. Pence would have support of the Cabinet and could invoke the 25 Amendment.

It’s quite possible what you relayed is true. However, coming from The Daily Beast you need to take things reported with a grain of salt.

Pence made clear he doesn't want to be the kingslayer.

They need to balance this against the impact this would have on their long-term ability to minimize taxes for the wealthy.

> I also said that nuclear war was also on the table.

Judging from what Pelosi has been doing, you are not alone with that concern. I hope there are enough people in between him and the actual button that would decide his order was unlawful.

>I hope there are enough people in between

There are -- the football is merely used to inform the relevant parties that the president has made the order, and, except for the submariners, those soldiers are probably aware of the events of the past 48h.

I believe SSBN crews would have been informed of these events by their CO over 1MC, and I'm sure COB would have his hands full censoring everybody's inbound email.

Now I need to ask my boys when they come back in...

There are controls in place to delay a launch order that comes out of nowhere.

Who knows what would happen. It's heartening that in multiple instances, both the US and USSR ignored positive and confirmed indications of massive incoming attack in the hopes they were erroneous.

> I also said that nuclear war was also on the table.

I think since he cowered so hard during his concession, he's done playing tough guy. He'll hand out medals and pardons and then run away.

I can't believe how much like "Animal Farm" this whole thing played out. Almost verbatim with the constant attempts to scapegoat Snowball/Antifa.

Although given that 80% of republicans think the election was stolen (and 40% of the population), this is just the start. I don't think Civil War is an exaggeration any longer, unless the Biden admin clamps down on the armed insurrection boiling over in the reddest parts of the country.

Clamping down is not notoriously effective. It has a tendency to build pressure, not release it.

Better to try and understand the complex psycho-social-economic factors that lead to this situation. Without a clear understanding of how a problem came to be, how can it be fixed?

By sending the people who participated or incited the riot to prison. Seriously, it's either that or the next coup will be successful.

Re-educating people has horrible connotations of Vietnam, Modern day China, etc and really doesn't work. So the most likely way of changing people's hearts and minds is war. Germans became peace lovers really fast after their country was destroyed end to end. Same with Japan.

As an American I hope it doesn't come to that. I fear we'll end up experiencing something like the Troubles. Low grade civil war.

I don't see any mention of reeducation in that comment, I see a suggestion to seek understanding of what's going on. A rather old-fashioned idea I must admit, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

> Clamping down is not notoriously effective.

"We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage-by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/C******n "migrants," those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage"[0].

I expect if Parler et. al. took similar stances against hate speech and open calls to violence, they would see similar results.

> Without a clear understanding of how a problem came to be, how can it be fixed?

You can't test a treatment without an intervention.

edit: fixed asterisks.

[0]https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3134666

> I expect if Parler et. al. took similar stances against hate speech and open calls to violence, they would see similar results.

I haven’t really looked into those platforms, but they’re new enough that they probably don’t have the tooling to do any of that. It took fb and Twitter years to build that.

I can't work out what r/C**n would spell could you share ?

From the citation:

> Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown "migrants," those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage.

They disappeared from reddit, they did not disappear from reality they just moved on to other place often time even more radicalized places with absolutely no chance of encountering differing opinions.

Reddit has become a Political echo chamber, I was pretty active in libertarian and a few other political subreddits years ago, i no longer am because it is just a Authoritarian left wing echo chamber, even the so call "conservative" and "libertarian" subreddits

My political views have not changed simply because I am not longer politically active in reddit, but to you that is "win"

It is not, it just makes it seem that way because your little corner of the internet is now a safe space free of any dissenting thought, in reality the cultural wedge is only getting larger

I'm not sure it's in the Democrats' best (short-term) interest to release this pressure. Trump has galvanized support for centrist Democratic politicians at a time when they were stuggling. Consider Sanders' support in 2016.

Perhaps I am too cynical, but at this point I would not be surprised if the Democrats stoke tensions for short-term gains, like the Republicans before them. I hope this does not come to pass, because surely this fanning of the flames would end with all of us burned.

By removing the problem. If somebody tries to destroy democracy, you first remove them from the position where they could do that, and then, once the immediate danger is gone, you can look at the complex factors.

Triage applies.

Upsetting Trump’s base is not some unforeseeable or mysterious accident. “When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

More speech, not less. A "clamp down" on wrong think will result in martyrs.

They need to start explaining and persuading. Something Biden has not really been forced to do in this process, unfortunately.

How do you explain to and persuade people who refuse to listen or even think? At a certain point you’re just explaining into the void and have become the crazy person yourself.

You can lead a horse to water and all...

Americans generally mean something very mild when they "clamp down." Countries like Russia really know what "clamp down" means -- you go into an area and kill or terrorize everyone who openly defies you, rinse and repeat every 20 years.

It's been established that you can't fight hate with more hate. However, hate speech must be controlled in order for greater freedom of speech to flourish.

That is the strategy that led to this point, needless to say it hasn't been effective and something else needs to be done. There's also plenty of historical precedent showing it to be ineffective.

I am convinced the perceptions of division are directly proportional to to the isolation of people claiming such division. It’s very easy to think absurd exaggerated things about some class of other people when you never talk to them.

Well, civil war is the least of it, it's hard to see how democracy itself survives as a method of government if half the country will just believe everything that is uttered by the latest freak of the moment, even when they've been lied to a thousand times before. Cults have always been limited in their impact by the very small number of people willing to join them -- so the cult leaders just disappear into the woods with 50 women to have weird sex parties. Democracy can't survive that behavior at mass scale.

It is a big mistake to think this is about Trump. Trump is a symptom of the dissatisfaction with the status quo not the source. Just go back and look at the reporting about how his message resonated and lead to his election.

Your comment is a great example of how to make things worse. You are asserting that "half the country" are mindless Trump cultists. This is just another version of Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" attitude.

Resolving the divisions in the American electorate needs to be a tad bit more sophisticated than asserting that 70 million people have lost their minds and aren't worth listening to. In fact if that is the type of approach taken by the Biden administration I think things will get much, much worse.

80% of Republicans believe that Biden won through fraud. Why? It's literally because Trump just started saying so. I don't think this is about Trump -- I think that there is a large group voters who are only comfortable if they are in thrall to someone (despite their constant harping about "freedom"), and Trump is the man of their moment. This is not about "dissatisfaction with the status quo" -- I'm not talking about the people who said "damn, our guy lost and we still haven't gotten rid of the Mexicans, we gotta run a better campaign next time." Those are logically sound individuals who are just ideological opponents, nothing that a society can't handle.

Let's separate the ideas of "what is the situation" and "how do we resolve the situation." When my son was a toddler he once broke down into a complete meltdown because I told him he couldn't ever be an iguana, which he had seen in a book and decided he wanted to be. Obviously, I didn't find a way to turn him into an iguana. There are ways of calming down people throes of a mental episode without creating the reality that exists only in their minds. Sure, pop a proverbial pacifier in their mouths.

I also do think that the left in particular has gotten a little too soft in terms of "every life has value." The most prominent place is in death penalty cases, where they try to avert the executions of the most heinous murderers you can imagine. The fact is, not every life has positive value to society. If someone is severely damaging society, whether it's by stabbing women in an alley or by other mechanisms, the utilitarian optimum is often for them to die. When a horde of terrorists assaults the seat of the federal government to overturn the lawfully elected government, it's not just one Ashli Babbitt that should be shot -- 75% of them should be, with the other 25% left to go spread the news that this behavior is not tolerated and you will suffer extreme consequences for attempting it.

>Resolving the divisions in the American electorate needs to be a tad bit more sophisticated than asserting that 70 million people have lost their minds and aren't worth listening to

Yes. But we need to understand why so many people believe flat-out lies. SO MANY PEOPLE. What do you think is behind that? HOw do so many believe such literal NON-sense?

I say step 1: bring back the fairness doctrine. I'm baffled that Tulsi Gabbard, of all people, has been the only person to re-introduce a bill in favor of it in ~30 years since it was abandoned.

How would a civil war actually happen? I know this idea gets thrown around, but, I don't see how this would happen.

Usually, civil wars happen with the support of (at least part of) the military and there are 0 doubts about who the army will side with. Even with the high rate of gun ownership in the US (and even higher among right-wingers), there is no way civilians will actually be able to whitstand a focused, concerted military effort.

The only caveat to that is if someone high up in the US military decides that this is their time to act and will try to use current civil unrest for a coup, but that seems extremely unlikely.

Another scenario to consider is an IRA/ETA style insurrection, which, again seems unlikely, as both IRA and ETA had strong geographical and cultural components to their identity, which is not true of right-wing extremists.

What is more likely to happen is for low-level civil unrest to be around for a while, as long as Trump is still in power, but, as soon as Biden comes into effect, the state will step in and very quickly squish anyone they suspect of right-wing violence. Still, it will probably get worse before it gets better.

> both IRA and ETA had strong geographical and cultural components to their identity, which is not true of right-wing extremists.

A funny detail is that plenty of the treasonweasels who decided to storm the Capitol also decided to document themselves doing so on social media. And since they come from all over the country, they're being identified, named, shamed, and outed by people who know them. They're being fired from their jobs. They're being arrested for their crimes.

They thought they were simply the bravest spearhead, enjoying the support of the massive silent majority of Americans. In reality, everyone is tired of their respective crazy racist uncle, and are gleefully outing them.

The internet has made it possible to surround yourself virtually with like-minded people, thinking you're one massive family. But if you're actually disconnected in reality, if you're actually surrounded by people who really don't share your views, thinking your echo chamber is representative is a massive mistake.

It only takes a few people to inspire many. I really hope it won’t come to that, and I don’t think Trump is brave enough.

As for going up against the military, there are quite a lot of vets in that demographic.

The urban vs rural divide is both geographic and cultural.

I keep saying, Trump is not the problem, he is the symptom.

> I don't think Civil War is an exaggeration any longer, unless the Biden admin clamps down on the armed insurrection boiling over in the reddest parts of the country.

I don’t know the path forward to ensure peaceful governance, but I’m 100% confident that this is not it. All that this will accomplish is to polarize those currently sitting on the sidelines to choose and commit to a side.

(Goes back and checks where the most violent protests happened this year and who perpetrated them...)

Huh.

I don't think the term "unamerican" should be used seriously. It has no strict definition and is often used to encourage an "Us vs Them" mentality and brings to mind the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

I believe tribalism is a vestigial trait most harmful to modern humanity and it should be discouraged whenever possible. We have changed our environment faster than evolution can keep up, so we are going to have to use our conscious minds to compensate if we are to stand a chance at long-term survival. This needn't be limited to genetic modification. Society can be modified, and it starts with one mind.

White supremacist violence clearly has a long history in America, and a significant support base, from the founding down to the present day. So calling it "un-American" is a bit selective about what counts as American.

What we can fairly call this is anti-republican and seditious.

In this context, I think you're being unnecessarily pedantic. When the President foments an angry mob to attack the capitol and threaten the lives of legislators, we are through the looking glass.

> I don't think the term "unamerican" should be used seriously. It has no strict definition and is often used to encourage an "Us vs Them" mentality and brings to mind the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

It's whatever the House Un-American Activities Committee doesn't like, isn't it?

If someone flew a plane into the White House to destroy the American government, is that anti-American?

If someone invites a mob to attack the Capitol and take the national legislature hostage, is that anti-American?

I am a Brit, but respect the usage of "unAmerican". To me, the equivalents on this side of the pond are expressions such as, "That's just not cricket", or, "Do have a care", or "Steady on, now."

These are idioms that express a culture, they are not intended to define rigidly some rules, but rather express a sentiment about shared and almost undefinable values.

I think "un-american" is different from those examples because of the history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...

Ah, I had never seriously associated the expression with that. I'd heard of the committee, and have some shallow understanding of the whole McCarthy era (as we vaguely call it over here), but I have always dismissed that - as far as idiom/the vernacular language goes - as a corruption and a glitch.

To me (not an American), unAmerican still implies "a bad sport", it doesn't carry the negatives associated with the McCarthy thing - which, to me and my peers, was decidedly unAmerican - a perversion of the sentiment that's for decades been acknowledged as evil and dismissed accordingly.

Do you mean he would use nuclear weapons against its own people?

What's the stop gap for the military in case an order this crazy would be made? Is he respected enough in the military circles that they would carry out his command?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25692148.

As I said in the Apple-Parler thread:

Massive Big Tech conglomerates must be busted through antitrust enforcement and Section 230 must be updated to ban predatory algorithms which have inflamed 7 years of sectarian chaos and violence.

It's not a free speech issue: It's about Too Big To Fail. They have too much power, beyond that of even the world's largest governments. This cannot stand.

How could you break up Twitter, what's your plan?

Half joking, but force them to federate their content to P2P networks like Mastodon?

Why joke? Thats a viable way to do it. No social network shoild be so large that massive global events can be shaped by it's executives.

What's to stop them from confederating afterwards?

They'll start with whoever they hate most and work their way on down. This is crazy.

In what sense is Twitter a "Massive Big Tech conglomerate"?

They're merely a successful platform.

What percentage of modern "news" articles use tweets as the primary source of research?

I'd guess the average "news" article today includes at least 1 tweet.

It's dumb, but Twitter has become where journalism happens.

> The type of person that stormed the capitol will perceive this as an escalation.

Who cares? The type of person that stormed the Capitol has shown they are impervious to reality. Time to stop the appeasement.

Rhetoric like this is why they stormed the capitol.

They were also delusional about the imperviousness of their actions. It doesn’t seem like any of them expected consequences. Underlining that there are consequences should be productive.

There are a lot of people hurting in America. It’s a terrible precedent to prioritise people threatening insurrection.

No they stormed the capitol because they refused to accept the outcome of an election after their candidate availed himself of every legal avenue of challenge. Fuck those people. The rhetoric that drove them was Trump himself and his stooges in conservative media.

It's not the responsibility of normal people to indulge the crazy satanic paedophile conspiracy theories of total lunatics so that said lunatics won't behave like total animals. They stormed the capitol because they believed complete horse shit about how the election was stolen, when it wasn't, and they were incited to do so by the current president.

Please don't equate pedophile conspiricies with this when the former is demonstrably provable. (just because an obvious psyop like Q talks about the topic doesnt automatically make the topic false, on the contrary that could and lijely is part of the intended effect of the psyop)

It enables such dismissals of legitmate questions such as why was Epstein was seen as an intelligence asset? Ignore the facts and jump straight to calling anything you dont like a crazy conspiracy theory so you can ban it!

Read up on Dutroux - Belgiums Xfiles or the Franklin scandal or the Finders or... if you think satanist pedophile conspiracies arent real.

Qanon is exactly what you are describing though. Quoting from Bellingcat [1]:

"Here is the core of the QAnon myth: with the aid of a small group of military intelligence officers called the Q team (one or more of whom is supposedly responsible for writing the drops), President Donald Trump is waging a shadow war against a cabal of Satan-worshipping, child-eating pedophiles who are conspiring to obstruct and overthrow him. The military will arrest them en masse in an event called “the Storm.”"

You can see why people would be uncomfortable dipping their toes into that water when so many people have been led to believe in "obvious psyops". Conspiratorial thinking is healthy until it isn't. Be careful about how deep you dive my friend.

1. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/07/the-maki...

I understand, but what I am meaning is that while I have yet to see any credible proof of electoral malfeasance, the other thing has evidence. What I propose is that this hesitancy is engineered as part of the psyop.

> Conspiratorial thinking is healthy until it isn't. Be careful about how deep you dive my friend.

A long time ago I made a decision, after particpating in what could rightfully be called a conspiracy myself (the Iraq war), that I will simply pursue the truth, and will always prefer the ugly truth to a beautiful lie. The fact is that much of the truth tends to touch conspiracy and I will not shirk away from it just because of that fact.

Fair enough. I respect you for being a healthy skeptic and requiring evidence.

>crazy lunatic theories

Just in the last four years: Anthony Weiner. Epstein. Dennis Hastert. NXIVM. Matter of public record. Just the ones that come to mind, out of the ones that came to light.

>horse shit

Check yourself. The state of Texas filed suit. Many states joined. Shame the SCOTUS punted, maybe cooler heads could have prevailed.

Stop treating these people like they are victims. They used force to attempt to stop the lawful, democratic transition of power by the joint session of the US Congress. The are traitors to this nation, full stop.

They can be both victims and traitors. As much as I’d like to live in a world where reason and reasonableness were innate, environment matters in determining a person’s mode of thought.

I like this NYTimes price someone posted elsewhere in this thread: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/trump-capitol-pro...

[Edit: This does not mean I think that the insurrectionists shouldn’t be held accountable! Though motivations can be complex, justice matters.]

No, rhetoric from the president is why they stormed the capital.

No, they stormed the capital because they've been fed a steady diet of lies and misinformation. Appeasing them does nothing but insulates them in their fantasy bubble. It's time for them to return to reality.

Do you have a better solution? You can't just continue to go along with people to avoid a fight. Some things are worth fighting for.

I would be very careful. There needs to be just the right amount of punishment. The goal is to get on board those who voted for Trump yet do not support the storming of the Capitol.

This is correct. In addition We need to provide an on ramp back into the mainstream for the radicalized. In addition we need to take real steps to stamp out environments that lead to radicalization. Hint: this starts before they log in to the internet, and you don’t become radicalized if your life is going well.

Plenty of people have done well out of radicalizing themselves for the Patreon revenue and the supplement affiliate marketing. Some of the people were arrested have turned out to have middle class jobs (which they were promptly fired from once spotted).

No, the radicalization is on the internet. And talk radio, and the TV.

I agree. That's an important point and I suppose that begins with the government focusing on enacting legislation to actually solve problems that would make people's lives better - healthcare, educational debt, financial assistance during the pandemic and so on - rather than say shutting down the government to try to erect a barrier.

> and you don’t become radicalized if your life is going well.

This is the kind of thing that we all would like to believe intuitively. But counterexamples are all too easy to find, unless you want to define "life is going well" narrowly enough that nobody qualifies.

Having a shit life is not a necessary or sufficient condition for radicalization. There is a correlation there, but I really doubt that it's the best predictor of who may fall victim to radicalization.

Yeah, the stories come to mind of some of the people that left Western countries to go to Syria to fight for Daesh, were caught there, then kicked out by Kurds and Americans to Iraq, where they were condemned and executed.

It's like we didn't learn from the '20s and '30s that appeasement doesn't work.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25692753.

So when Will Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez be suspended for tweeting support for violent protests? [0]

[0]: https://nypost.com/2019/11/03/aoc-tweets-her-support-for-ant...

What she wrote on Twitter: "Ending mass incarceration means challenging a system that jails the poor to free the rich. Arresting people who can’t afford a $2.75 fare makes no one safer and destabilizes our community. New Yorkers know that, they’re not having it, and they’re standing up for each other."

Where exactly was she inciting violence?

Yet twitter doesn't ban the iranian ayatollah for inciting violence against Israelis, which actually does result in significant violence as opposed to the potential for violence.

Is this Jack's entry into the 2024 race for potus?

IMHO there are things that are much more scary than some trespassing into government buildings or a riot. The possibility that we might slide backwards from traditionally liberal ideas spawned from the enlightenment is utterly terrifying. And we are rapidly heading in that direction.

I feel like after the twin towers were blown up.

It was less than 100 individuals that were the impetuous for one of the worst pieces of legislation I know of. The Patriot Act. Which was voted on in a complete state of fear. Creating an extra judicial process for people who fit into a given category.

I fear the reaction to this, which I'd argue is why Twitter needed a great press release to justify banning Trump (which they can and should do as a private corporation).

EDIT: I feel like we're in a reactionary state of shock where lawmakers may try to push laws that sound good to people who are in shock and fear.

Let's hope they don't.

> I feel like we're in a reactionary state of shock where lawmakers may try to push laws that sound good to people who are in shock and fear.

Yes, less than a year after trump allowed the patriot act to expire.

Like a stopped clock, Trump has on a few rare occasions done the right thing, and I have been surprised and grateful whenever it has happened.

Ha, what timing. Now we can make laws about domestic terrorism and give the government the same powers.

Seems it was the House:

The Senate passed a 77-day extension in March 2020, but the House of Representatives did not pass the legislation before departing for recess on March 27, 2020.[13][14][15][16]

(Wikipedia)

Liberal ideas from the enlightenment are alive and well. Now if the government had banned Trump from speaking, then you would have a point. Twitter banning Trump is, at root, a business making a business decision.

Here's reality, and I'm going to date myself here, but there were, long ago, enormously popular digital spaces called BBS's. You could chat, play games (MUDs mostly), etc etc. They are, by and large, no longer with us. New and admittedly better technologies came along. So will it be with Social Media. As difficult as it may be for people to believe, 40 years from now, Social Media in its current form will probably not be with us any longer.

Here's the thing though, the government will still be with us. So it's the government that we need to constrict. And, using the tool of our Constitution, we do an admirable job of constricting the government's ability to restrict our free speech. That Twitter says a man can't talk on their private property is not a societal problem. That the government says a man can't talk anywhere in the country is a societal problem. There's been far too much conflating of these two issues, they are not the same.

I agree in some respects but comparing the nature of the internet today compared to the internet we remembered back in the 90s, it’s abundantly clear that consolidation and centralization are significant forces.

We’re not really making the same progress on decentralizing the web that we thought we would. Is it really that difficult to see further consolidation as the most likely outcome?

Mass decentralization may bring on centralization of lies and deceit though.

The ideal requires great maturity.

Yeah, except for the fact that there’s no one bbs “to rule them all”. The power these platforms have mean they’re up there in terms of influence of govt.

As I saw concisely said on Twitter: If you can silence a king, you are the king

There are reasonable concerns about precedent here, but it's hard to see a reasonable perspective where this particular enforcement action is "silencing". If Trump has something he'd like people to hear, he can simply announce a press conference, and dozens of major news organizations will be ready within minutes to share his thoughts with the world.

How quickly we forget the past. Trump took to Twitter specifically because he believed none of the news organizations were reliable narrators of his messaging.

He believed that because to him, anything less than obsequious praise is fake. It doesn’t make it true.

Back in 2017 Trump had 3643 domains. I can only speculate that there are more now. There's no substance to the claim that he's silenced.

https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/20/technology/trump-websites/i...

How many eyeballs spend how many minutes per day on those domains?

Exposure != delivery points.

Twitter has audience.

There's nothing more absurd than calling the loudest carnival barker on the planet with virtually every form of media at his hands "silenced".

Yes. Agree, but only if you also remove Section 230 that provides immunity from civil liabilities for such businesses making business decisions.

Oh absolutely. I've long been in favor of getting rid of section 230. I'm not sure why we have it?

Lets put aside the events that this suspension is targeting and just focus on the statement of business making a business decision about their private property.

Why is there a difference between Twitter, Inc making such decision and Verizon Communications. Neither are government.

The only reasonable argument that I can think of is that Twitter holds less of an monopoly to their users than Verizon. That however seems to me as up to interpretation, and not about the question about what is or isn't private property.

Verizon will close accounts that are used to commit crimes.

We are talking about two different things. One is an ISP that closes an account, and the other is an ISP that has a firewall that prevents access by their customers to reach a site that has information from Trump.

Sedition, terrorism, and advocating the overthrow of the government ARE NOT PROTECTED SPEECH. If the government did tell Trump he was banned it wouldn't violate any liberal principles. It's not personal that's just the law. And it's litterally the law in every country on earth.

There is literally nothing Trump said that advocated for either terrorism or the overthrow of the government. Also sedition is protected speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seditious_libel#Seditious_spee...

The trespassing and sacking of the capitol is precisely a sign of backsliding on traditionally liberal ideas from the enlightenment, much more so than Twitter banning the number one inciter of the aforementioned insurrection.

The outrage it's generated from all corners of American society seem to run against that idea. Just because a relatively small mob of determined extremists can raid a building for an afternoon does not indicate some kind of earth-shattering, society-changing transformative event. Popular social media platforms using shaky, uneven, and arguably unjustifiable logic to ban both speech and people from their respective shares of the public sphere is, however, indicative of an ever-growing attack by monopolized social platforms on exactly those traditionally liberal ideas that makes such amazingly diverse and open-minded communities to begin with.

I don't disagree with anything you said. But terrorist violence & sedition are not protected speech. Whether they banned him for the right or wrong reason, he still needs to be banned.

It's true that terrorism & sedition is not protected speech, but it's also true that the logic Twitter is invoking here to connect the tweets to terrorism & sedition is questionable at best. Regardless, why should we accept Twitter banning people for the "wrong" reasons?

> why should we accept Twitter banning people for the "wrong" reasons

I think this confuses "you" with "we".

You shouldn't accept it if you feel it is unfair, and you should express that if you feel the need to, subject to the rules of whatever platform you use to express it.

But "we" (as in the people of the United States), via the powers of government, have no right under the Constitution to compel (or if you prefer, to "not accept") Twitter to allow him to tweet on their platform.

It had been this way with private moderation basically since forever. What makes you think the owners need your acceptance?

Sedition is protected speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seditious_libel#Seditious_spee...

> as long as it does not indicate an "imminent" threat.

You missed a pretty pertinent qualifier here, but that was interesting, thanks for sharing.

“a building“

It matters a lot which building they raided, and who praised them for doing so.

True. All the more important we can't let attacks on our important national symbols cloud our judgement and allow vague claims and anger to steer our decisions.

“important national symbols”

It’s not just a symbol.

The entire chain of succession was in that building. Both houses. VP Pence. Pelosi. VP-elect Harris.

And the insurrectionists came for them.

It was 9 justices and 1 President short of a State of the Union address.

actual insurrectionists would've have done more than take selfies, commit petty vandalism and wander around in a daze for a couple of hours. it was a boomer chimpout.

the people who are using the language of insurrection/terror etc are doing so with the purpose of creating casus belli to enact retribution on their political & cultural enemies and to turn the war on terror inwards. if we have learned nothing about restraint in the years after 9/11 then we are heading for a nightmare scenario.

>>the people who are using the language of insurrection/terror etc are doing so with the purpose of creating casus belli to enact retribution on their political & cultural enemies and to turn the war on terror inwards.

Seems that way to me too. Time will tell, I guess.

Like killing a police officer and bringing pipebombs and zipties?

> actual insurrectionists would've have done more than take selfies, commit petty vandalism and wander around in a daze for a couple of hours. it was a boomer chimpout.

Because they were foiled - their targets were successfully evacuated. They sought out Pelosi and Schumer's offices specifically - the ones outfitted in military tactical gear I mean, not the grandma that needed help getting back down the stairs. They built a gallows and were chanting "Hang Mike Pence".

“actual insurrectionists would've have done more than take selfies“

Perhaps they would have if the evacuation had been unsuccessful, or if the certified electoral college results had still been around.

Restraint and appeasement are two different things.

> the people who are using the language of insurrection/terror etc are doing so with the purpose of creating casus belli to enact retribution on their political & cultural enemies and to turn the war on terror inwards. if we have learned nothing about restraint in the years after 9/11 then we are heading for a nightmare scenario.

I can see how the actions seem relatively harmless if you consider them in a vacuum.

But this is just goalpost-moving, and it's happened every time something awful has happened over the past 4 years.

Perhaps it will help if you consider the totality of the scenario; the plans to travel, the bombs and munitions created and acquired; the calls to violence from the president just before the actions; Rudy Giuliani asking for "trial by combat" as the crowd prepared to march on the Capitol. The repeated quotes *from the insurrectionists themselves* announcing that "this is a revolution" and talking about hanging people, coming for their heads, overturning the election.

Quite simply, if you read the definition of insurrection, there's no way to NOT apply it to these events, and sedition to apply to the president and Rudy among others.

So, you'd rather have a despot than to censor a potential despot?

Congress asking for help and the president ignoring it. Governors asking if they could send in help and the executive said no. It took Mike fucking Pence, whose job is NOT to activate the national guard, to activate the national guard before extra help was sent over. What the fuck happened January 6th?

The pure inaction of everyone involved surrounding the situation in the Capitol building should terrify you. The rioters never should have even gotten inside the building.

All valid points. At the very least this mess provides a case study of the potential consequences of reducing law enforcement presence in favor of optics

I think most of that has actually been disproven.

At a minimum, the mayor de-escalated and restricted the national guard before the march started, and the capital police turned away initial offers of help (they're segregated from other federal police due to separation of powers, and Congress wants it that way).

But yes, can you blame them for not wanting to deploy the national guard, when he got crucified 6 months ago for... Wanting to deploy the national guard to protect the White House from repeated attacks?

The worst outrage based on pathological lies.

>Just because a relatively small mob of determined extremists can raid a building for an afternoon does not indicate some kind of earth-shattering, society-changing transformative event.

It absolutely does indicate that. Read up on German history.

It hasn't generated outrage from all corners of society - in a YouGov survey[1], 45% of Republican voters supported the storming of the Capitol and 68% did not view it as a threat to democracy. That still doesn't make it a transformative event per se, but maybe more like a transformatively revealing symptom of a larger problem that already existed?

Edit: not to throw just one party under the bus. Same survey showed 21% of voters overall approved and 32% didn't see it as a threat to democracy. That's still a lot more than an isolated few Americans.

[1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

The fact that this was incited by President of US for whom about 70 million voted for despite him showing all these tendencies for pay 4 years would mean that this is intact a huge event. How the hell can any sane person call this a trivial event?

Thank you for saying concisely what I've been thinking.

the widespread negation of facts and obliteration or information on subjects at fiat for political purposes strongly resembles to my mind only a reversal of centuries of libertarian and democratic advancement with frightening and real potential consequent potential for according reversal in social and economic development.

> IMHO there are things that are much more scary than some trespassing into government buildings or a riot.

Yeah, like, some people trespassing into government buildings in the middle of officially declaring the next president, with an intention to disrupt the procedure, at the urge of the current outgoing president. Now that is some scary shit.

And occupying the Senate building for the SCOTUS confirmation, admittedly to intimidate senators to change their vote, is different how? Other than one was met with resistance and the other was given unfettered access.

Probably all of the violence, vandalism, looting, and coming in with tools to take hostages. And bombs with timers placed elsewhere.

HN: "Yes, but other than that stuff..."

</s>

where have you been for the past 8 months?

One was given access then 300 people were arrested for their civil disobedience (loud chanting, refusal to leave). Fox reported it as "[there to] protest Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court and put pressure on the handful of undecided senators". I've seen no indication people carried weapons, pushed through barricades, or threatened anyone.

> IMHO there are things that are much more scary than some trespassing into government buildings or a riot.

Yes, like trespassing into government buildings for the purpose of preventing a peaceful, lawful democratic transfer of power.

Protest is compatible with democracy. What happened two days ago is not. If you don't like the outcome of an election, you can complain about it, you can be a nuisance about it, you can talk about it. What you can't do, is try to carry out a coup.

> slide backwards from traditionally liberal ideas spawned from the enlightenment

It's not by chance that enlightenment ended in the terror the first time around, people should read more about the past.

Whilst I agree somewhat, that's a sufficiently abstract case to make that cognizablity is low.

Things that are tangible and can be seen or sensed or emoted directly have impact. Crowds, sounds, death, damage, violence, mayhem.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25692834.

Instead of banning him when they should, they milked the cow as far as they could, now hes some days to be irrelevant so they can virtue signal for free. Twitter are not the good guys at all

Social networks have more power than they can handle, I hope they suffer more regulations, the influence in politics is too much

Poor guy. Zuck banned him from Facebook and Instagram. Jack banned him from Twitter too.

What will happen to his cherished Freedom of Speech?

Well, he and his followers can always sign up on TikTok.

How many days until trump.tv (or some equivalent) launches, I wonder (in anticipation)?

Considering that censorship maybe helps with the reduction of the lies, it does currently a very poor job. 60minutes posted their totally fabricated video of Schiff, on Twitter and Youtube. It is well on air on both platforms, with hundreds of thousands of views, and their account is not suspended. This is clearly illegal, and Peter filed lawsuit for defamation against the company. However before a judgement of the law is done nothing is going on. How about waiting for the judges to look at the Trump situation and afterwards we will see? In case Twitter fact checkers work as judges, that's seriously dystopian.

https://twitter.com/60mins/status/1317769169543131136 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euabgDdLToA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S333his4q0o

Twitter, please, devour my soul

The real danger of this is that this type of action only reinforces the MAGA camp and pushes them to extreme counter-actions.

That's 74 million Americans with a large portion of them shooting guns, who feel victimized and have nothing to lose.

I'm already hearing a huge spike in the number of private / chartered jets leaving United States. I think they know what's coming next and they don't want to stick around. Many of them have begun moving their assets abroad since the beginning of 2020 as they weren't sure if Biden would be president and raise taxes across the board.

    Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri:

    “We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and (the) God known by many names, many different faiths,” he said. “Amen, and Awomen.”

Can you really blame people who are alarmed by this? I thought the African American students getting a professor fired for using the Chinese filler word "Nige" was peak 2020 but that amen business topped it.

I give a lot of leeway to private companies, but there is something deeply concerning about Facebook and Twitter deciding what politicians are “acceptable”. Whether you like him or hate him, Donald Trump is a mainstream politician as evidenced by the tens of millions of votes he got.

And, there is a non-trvial chance he’d like to run for elected office again. But Twitter and Facebook and several companies seem to explicitly be saying, “no, we will not allow that.”

It’s not a power I want Jack Dorsey or Zuck to have.

as I've said for Facebook before: too little, too late.

this is wrong. I dislike Trump and his 4 years but this is wrong.

Elaborate.

1A says the government can't make a law abridging speech.

It doesn't say Twitter can't refuse to make posts submitted by X available to everyone who accesses their systems via the Internet.

I can see where if many people depend on a company, some need to prevent arbitrary cutoffs of service is needed if the service is needed for life--such as heating, food, ER service, etc. Twitter is not needed for basic survival.

Who is going to get banned for the BLM protestor that shot and killed a Trump supporter?

Is this a parody or do you actually have nouns like names that you can use?

It happened in Portland over the summer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_an...

I think it's safe to say that Reinoehl has been banned from Twitter.

But what about the people who incited him? Clearly individuals are not responsible for their own actions. The responsibility lies with people who say things on social media.

I'm not sure it follows from some people were incited to all individual actions are the result of incitement.

On one side you have people telling one group that there is a vast systemic conspiracy to exclude them from economic opportunity and murder them with impunity.

On the other side you have people telling another group that there is a vast systemic conspiracy to politically disenfranchise them and exclude them from the public sphere.

Both groups predictably view this as an existential threat and resort to violence. One is excused and even praised.

Don't worry, we're prosecuting both the insurrectionists as well as attempting to punish those who are engaged in felony sedition.

You're not even trying to create an equivalency here. Show me the non-deleted tweet that said "hey, BLM protestor, bring a gun and shoot this guy".

Are you serious? People are writing entire books called "In Defense of Looting" and they receive no criticism, just fawning articles in the media[1]. No publisher employees are threatening to walk out over it either.

And for the record I support this author's right to speak her mind as well. It's just obvious that some speech is more free than others.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

CNN had reporters stand in front of burning buildings and tell us protests were "mostly peaceful".

I guess we could say Trump's administration had mostly no mobs of insurrectionists storming the Capitol.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25692148.

George Orwell was right. He just got the year wrong: 2021 instead of 1984.

Kamala Harris encouraged the extremely violent and destructive BLM riots that killed more than 25 people and caused over $2 billion in property damage, but that didn't seem to get anyone's attention. She even set up a bail fund for the terrorists who participated in those riots.

After the official @twitter account carried the race baiting terrorist #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in their bio throughout the best part of 2020 their excuse on this rings hollow.

I expect the platform to wither, alternatives to flourish and both Zuckerberg and Dorsey to require security wherever they roam from now on.

If I was staff at Twitter today, I would resign.

We don’t have to imagine. #BLM incited many riots which killed many people, what action did Twitter take there?

Suspended: https://twitter.com/blm

https://web.archive.org/web/20130825024428/https://twitter.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170718112930/https://twitter.c...

Strangely enough, Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo said this in October:

"Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I'll happily provide video commentary."

@dickc was never suspended. He still has his account.

That really doesn’t feel like inciting or calling for riots or violence to me. Maybe if @dickc had a large and heavily armed following there’d be more subtext to read between the lines... (i.e. “and we should start this riot now”)

I thought it was going to be the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation.

That's not BLM's account. This is:

https://twitter.com/Blklivesmatter

For proof that's official, see https://blacklivesmatter.com/statement-from-black-lives-matt...

It's not suspended.

Here's a better example. Spike Lee was _never_ banned, even though he sent an angry mob to an innocent person's house where people who happened to share a name with someone in the news lived.

Spike Lee settled:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/spike-le...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/spike-lee-sued-zimmerman_n_42...

From [0]

So they still want to defund the police. I don't think even the next administration would agree with demand #6.

[0] https://twitter.com/Blklivesmatter/status/134773793490928845...

I'm not sure this even deserves a follow up question. But go ahead and show some specifics.

It is accurate to say BLM incited riots? I'll counter with this: BLM organized protests which were peaceful and then bad actors incited riots. What happened on the Capitol was not peaceful from the outset--people came up, climbed the wall, broke through the entryway, took a podium, etc.--they started it.

Couldn’t you just as accurately say they organized peacefully at the Capitol and THEN made it non-peaceful by doing those things?

No.

Care to explain?

Not really. It's so obvious that the only person that would likely disagree with me is person that will likely disagree with reality, but here I go anyways.

Trump called for insurrection. He didn't call for a protest. So did Trump Jr. So Did Giuliani. It's a matter of public record.

Also the people, and please respect that I single out this comment as completely tangential to the original point, that try to make the "Sure Trump supporters rioted, but BLM!" argument never seem to take the following into account:

BLM is fighting against a system that arbitrarily tortures and executes them, often with impunity. While The Trump supporters are literally fighting to end American democracy.

Where in his speech did he specifically call for insurrection? Quote it. You can blame him for riling people up all you want, but he never instructed anybody to break into the capitol or interfere with the electoral vote or anything of that nature. People who were there even say that they were breaking into the Capitol while Trump was still speaking.

So tired of people having these absolutely vile attitudes (accusing the person you're responding to of being "likely to disagree with reality") while never presenting any facts.

Rudy said the phrase “trial by combat”

Yes, he did. And you could rightfully point to that as incitement of violence. However, that is not Trump calling for insurrection.

Edit: I've been hit with the dreaded "You're posting too fast" block, meaning I cannot respond anymore. Why? Because I asked somebody who said that Trump was on public record calling for insurrection to prove it with a quote.

So in the absence of explicit instruction - go to the Capitol, break through the barricade, enter the chamber - there is no responsibility? What if a leader uses phrases like “we need to fight and take back our country and you know what needs to be done”? I’d hope there is a higher standard for president of the United States

> But they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. They’re not. This is a movement. I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day. And everyone should take note of that on both levels. That they’re not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.

Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XxLR2r5oPg

Whataboutism is perhaps the most ignorant defense used by Trump supporters.

This is not a defense of anything. That's something you projected onto the comment on your own.

The comment is simply pointing out the hypocrisy and double standard that pervades this discussion.

If pointing this out makes you angry, that's not an issue with the comment, but an issue with your ability to handle information that undermines your constructed narrative.

The irony of a Trump supporter claiming projection and hypocrisy. These are literally the founding principles of Trumpism.

And yes, your comment was clear example of whataboutism.

There is no point, the dude is lost to reality.

So in other words, you cannot prove the thing you said. I suppose you are right, I am lost to reality.

The point of keeping one's language in the gray area is to avoid culpability. It's no different from when a boss wants their employee to do something unethical/illegal; they don't come out and ask for it explicitly. That isn't how real life usually works.

When people say Trump incited an insurrection, they are bearing this in mind. All but the most obtuse of people understand this.

Folks take the part where T stated at the in-person event (IIRC) to "go wild".

So, he didn't say "do an insurrection" he said those other - on the margin things (are those the things called dog whistles?) like "go wild" and "we will never back down" and the like.

They are playing the "Yes judge, he said the man would make an Excellent Cadaver, but he only meant that he hoped the man lives out his natural life in good health and turns into a good looking corpse in a completely natural sense" game.

Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XxLR2r5oPg

Trump repeatedly encouraged protestors to stay peaceful leading up to the riot:

> Jan 6th, 2:38 PM: Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!

> 3:13PM 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!

From: https://www.thetrumparchive.com/

Can you link to where Trump called for insurrection? If that's true, that would certainly be significant. He's certainty spread unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, and it culminated in a riot. But saying that someone called for an insurrection is a very specific and very serious claim, and one that is best supported with references.

I think the debating of what percentage of demonstrations were violent, or whether the violent people were provocateurs, is a red herring. I don't honestly know, for any of them, and I think people get trapped into arguing stuff they don't know.

The outrage is that, regardless of how many people were violent at or around the protests for racial justice, the ones who weren't violent were brutalized on many occasions. Lots of people, reporters and ordinary people, experienced it and documented it. And at the attack on the Capitol, no matter how many people were peaceful, the authorities gave the violent people strikingly more free rein.

Simply by arguing the statistics, I think you get derailed from what matters, which is how both sides are not equal.

Here we are mostly in agreement. On the flip side, BLM got much more favorable treatment from media, even if they did not get that treatment from cops.

You are right. Things are not equal. I would love for the same standard to be applied to everyone.

It's probably more accurate to say that a some of the protesters were prepared to commit acts of violence towards those in the Capitol building, some had no interest in violence, and others had no explicit plans but were caught up by mob mentality.

The real differences are the lies and craziness.

No, because they were doing things the president told them to! He scheduled the rally to directly coincide with congress's certification session. He didn't tell them to break into the Capitol, but he told them to march there. He didn't tell them to attack congress, but he told them they were in session trying to steal his election.

I don't understand why people keep arguing that the incitement thing is blurry. It's not. Any other speaker at that rally who had said the same things would be trivially charged. This was a crime, in ways that BLM organizing a march isn't. (Maybe there are some other BLM-related actions where people called out a target like this, it was a big movement. I'm not aware of one though.)

> I don't understand why people keep arguing that the incitement thing is blurry.

It’s denial and it’s obvious that they want to believe something else with all their might. If Trump said it literally go do the deed there would be some who would argue that’s not true. Strategy amongst trolls is to wear us down a la gaslighting but I don’t understand what’s the long term goal, if there is any.

"I don't understand why people keep arguing that the incitement thing is blurry."

Because it is. I dislike Trump as much as the next guy, but he didn't say anything new in that speech ( frankly, neither did anyone that preceded him ). What he did, however, is consistently rile up his base. This time he overshot. And he did not even overshot with words. Tons of worse things are said on many political meetings if you ever been to one. He overshot with the timing and a sense of desperation. And the retard got burned playing with fire.

> I don't understand why people keep arguing that the incitement thing is blurry.

What you are really saying is that you don't think it is blurry.

The reason people argue that it is blurry is because they want to advance the interests of that side. So they argue whatever they can, including the blur, which might give them a 50-50 chance of prevailing in amongst the confusion.

It's how people argue when they can't prevail in an argument based on principle, logic, or literality.

Some of the participants were carrying things like nylon handcuffs, bombs (or bomb making materials?) and molotov cocktails. This preparation proves that peaceful protest was never the core intent.

The same could be said for the previous riots.

I'd be willing to say that they met at the White House with the intention of a peaceful rally/protest. However, that rally is where the match lit the fuse. They were sent to the Capitol to cause mayhem. Two different but related events to consider. If there was to be an organized event at the Capitol, things would have been prepared differently. However, the Capitol was already undergoing preparations for the Inauguration. I seriously doubt the people in charge of those plans would have agreed to a rally at the Capitol.

The order of events has troubled me since the beginning.

People came to a protest. Trump made a speech on the stage. People got incited to rush the building by what was said.

But then we the events that say that people constructed bombs at home and organized an attack far in advance, and traveled to the protest in order to rush the building.

The odd thing is that I heard similar narratives about BLM riots. In some it was said that BLM organized protests which were peaceful, but which later turned into riots. Other say that the rioters was people from outside that had planned the rioting in advanced and traveled to the protests.

Are all four versions true, or only a subset?

All statements are true, except for where they're mutually exclusive:

For both the Trumpist Insurrection and the BLM protests, some people were intending a peaceful march, some were intending a riot, and some were even intending or hoping for violence.

However, where the Trumpist Insurrection differs was the (small?) portion that intended a "revolution," to quote one Elisabeth from Knoxville. The most extreme form of BLM seemed to be the CHOP, which may have wished for an autonomous zone, but not a revolution.

Bogaloo group has been mentioned before. At this point, I am certain that there are groups in US keen on using existing tensions for their goals.

"BLM organized protests which were peaceful and then bad actors incited riots."

Interesting line of argument. How is it different from capitol climb? The protest in DC were mostly peaceful until after Trump ( and friends ) speech. It is just some bad actors, who incited riots.

"What happened on the Capitol was not peaceful from the outset--people came up, climbed the wall, broke through the entryway, took a podium, etc.--they started it."

This is where we may disagree. Initially, it was just a gathering. The wall climbing and all that jazz happened after speeches were over. Timeline is important.

Source? Politifact rates that False.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25692481.

This is not a good idea. Whatever you think about Trump, he is still holding public office.

It is a bad idea.

And it seems coordinated with a parler ban at app store level and a purge of other political figures.

It just begs for a counter move. He is still the president, not all out of options.

(null)

It is bad for a number of reasons.

Mostly because the us at this moment needs healing, not further escalation of conflict.

Update: People are more emotionally involved with this than I am. I'll avoid getting involved.

He spoke to them for over an hour telling them how angry they should be, that they should go to the Capitol, and that they should fight. The mob did as he told them to do.

It is 100% certain that the riots would not have happened without him and the things he Tweeted. I don't even see how you can make that argument honestly.

This seems eerily like the academia and elites supporting Stalin right before they got sent to gulags.

Baffling how most people on this site fail to see it.

Trump says America first - BANNED

Iran's Ayatollah says Death To America - allowed.

Just shows where people's allegiance lies.

Please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. You've been doing this repeatedly. Yes, lots of others are doing it too—that doesn't make it ok, that makes it worse.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful. The intended spirit is thoughtful, curious conversation. People can't do that and be in battle mode at the same time—the nervous system doesn't work that way.

HN's rules apply to all political affiliations and all users, regardless of how right they are or feel they are, and regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are.

Big Tech, Big Oil, Wall Street, media, publishers, etc–every single circle of elites has now banded together to toxify anyone who deigned to support Trump. Basically a variation of "Don't buy from Jews". Very, very dangerous game being played here.

I think every platform is banning Trump now when they know he's going to go in two weeks and a new president is coming. They wouldn't have done it had he been still in power (for extended time) and had done the exact same thing. I mean, they should have done it a lot sooner!

I fear REAL violence is coming.

If people feel trapped and their voices aren’t heard it is just going to create a spring release. Like a cornered animal.

These political activist employees and executives are going to get real people killed in the name of owning the President.

Everyone on every side is so wrong here it is heart breaking.

Trump has truly broken both the Left and the Right’s minds of this country.

I think a lot of people on the left know what they did and said is wrong. And they only did it for what they thought was the greater good.

For now they can't even begin to consider how they might have been wrong.

(For the record I wanted Sanders to win the democratic nomination and have never voted for anyone on the right)

"Real people" already got killed. Might be time to put down the Both Sides bong.

I’m not even opposed to Biden, who is basically just a moderate Republican. But each day I get more and more outraged by the non-stop media smears and hysteria against Trump. I find my blood boiling at the hypocrisy—and I’m basically just a passive observer. For a real Trump supporter—of which there are tens of millions—I can only imagine the intensity of the hatred and anger that this speech suppression and new impeachment charade will cause. Instead of letting an old man go off to pasture and maybe start a little media company, they want to keep attacking and fanning the flames.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/

Proof that you could literally be the President of the United States and society will still be justified in muzzling and deplatforming you if what you have to say is too dangerously inappropriate -- with or without the government's help.

Insane and outrageous.

#WalkAway is a movement of ex liberals who have left the democrat party. Founded by a gay dude, majority blacks, hispanics, gay etc. Had over half a million users who shared their testimonials on why they left the democrat party. Facebook banned the group today along with the founder and all the members.... all 500K of them

If gays, blacks, hispanic conservatives aren't allowed, then soon they are coming after you.

A world governed by patch notes. Hoo boy.

DISCLAIMER: I think Trump is essentially diabolical, do not support him nor his behavior, and have a visceral loathing for the man and his (lack of) ideas.

This is a grossly opportunistic instance of moral signaling from Twitter. I believe this independent of whether or not I believe they should ban him. Trump's behavior hasn't changed, his tweets are not more inflammatory than they've been in the past, and his influence is trending towards zero. They banned him as a moral signal at a time when the backlash they'll experience is at a minimum.

Twitter is a shit storm and has been for years. They know it, we know it, the public knows it, everybody knows it. If Twitter actually cared about not being a Platform For Evil, they would just turn off the fucking angry echo chamber push algorithms, take a massive hit in their stock price, and be about their business. The "social utility" would be the same and we wouldn't have to worry about conspiratorial asshats going viral and reaching 50 million souls. But instead they go on burning the public good to fuel their money-printing machine and then crucify the enemy to signal their virtue when the wealth well dries up.

Is Twitter also going to ban AOC for inciting and participating in a riot at Capitol Hill in 2018? Because she not only encouraged an occupation of the Capitol then, but she also directly participated in it (https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/alexandria-ocasio-cortez...). The same group repeated their illegal act multiple times (https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2019/02/25/kentucky-yo...). Each time, it was cheered on by politicians who still retain their Twitter handles and each time the media did not cover it or condemn the act like they have the recent capitol riot.

Twitter and other big tech companies are clearly using two different standards, based on whether you are a far left progressive or not. And this suspension of Trump makes no sense given that there is no evidence that he incited violence. Asking people to march somewhere is not inciting violence. It simply isn't and everyone repeating the word 'incite' is being disingenuous, especially if they are not consistent and don't apply it to all the BLM riots in 2020.

This move is therefore just a disgusting act of censorship, and it sets a precedent and highlights further the need for alternate platforms to big tech companies based in overwhelmingly left-leaning cities with overwhelmingly left-leaning employee bases.

Whatever you think about Trump, he has First Amendment rights under the U.S. constitution. If violating the law, he should be punished, but it is not up to private companies to revoke constitutional rights.

Trump still has the right to speak publicly. No one should wish that he be silenced by private companies.

Trump should just tell his supporters to go to his own web site and communicate with them that way. There's no reason he has to use Twitter. He can use email. It might even be more effective for him.

The first amendment prevents the government from making laws which prevent free speech. Private companies aren't obliged to host that speech if they don't want to

Yes, of course, safe to say everyone on HN knows this.

Twitter banning Trump isn't such a big deal. He can get a web site and email service from AWS or other cloud providers.

But what if the cloud providers ban his web site and email?

What if backbone internet providers and data centers banned his IT team from running their own web/email servers?

There is no government run internet. It is all run by private companies. Which means that if private companies wanted to, they could restrict access to anyone they want.

This is clearly wrong. We either need to create a government run internet backbone + data centers, or to draw some line at how much power private internet companies have.

The Supreme Court could decide that the internet is so vital to the First Amendment in the modern world that the top N social media or internet infrastructure companies have to behave as if they were government run with respect to the First Amendment.

You have the right to speak. You have no right to an audience, nor to compel a third party to spend time, effort and money providing you either audience or amplification.

He has the White House web site. He wouldn't even use the @potus Twitter account because he'd rather have people follow his personal account.

Are you saying he has a First Amendment right on Twitter?

That's not the case.

Bill of Rights does not apply to Twitter.

There is no argument for censorship, suspension or banning, based on our 1st amendment—- on any of the multiple platforms doing so.

I came on here just to check what the “young intellectual tech” community thinks— I consider myself part of it. I’m a 20-something female who has been heavily involved in tech for my short career.

Heads up: This isn’t animal farm, this is 1984!

I never post on here and stopped reading awhile ago due to the one-minded propaganda I consistently find on the site these days (i was a lurker a longtime before i made this account) but I feel compelled to share my opinion because these times matter, and us young (and old) folks matter.

Amen and a-women? Welcome to the best addition to New Speak. Please look that up if you don’t know what it is. Have you zoomed out on how Big (and Little) Techs subtle involvement here? And how they may be affecting how you’re thinking? I can personally say after having deleted social media for a year and combing through different sources (time consuming), I feel very differently now than I did four years, or eight years ago.

“I don’t like Trump” and “not being a Trump supporter,” the badges of honor on Hacker News. But here’s my practical advice: be very careful who you’re choosing. Everything in life is a trade off— even who’s in the White House, who’s in office, who you’re casting your votes for.

Another piece of advice: for some laughs, and practical news these days, check out AwakenwithJP and Brett Pella :-) hope your hackers but your thinking caps on and leave confirmation bias in 2020.

Funny coincidence, I was enjoying JP's Ted Talk an hour before you posted this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79zra755WgA

I’ll have to give that a watch, didn’t realize he had a Ted talk! My favorites so far are “what its like living in California” and “instagrams new terms of service - not sketchy at all!”

The Brett Pella on Californians moving back to California one is also hilarious (can you tell I live here lol born and raised)

Trump has caused real damage to our society and democracy through his social media accounts. It is about time. Having said that, these actions ring hollow to me. He could have been banned a long time ago; this week's events are a culmination of brainwashing the weak through social media that has gone on for over four years. All of these Republican senators and representatives falling over each other to denounce him this week had the opportunity to remove him from office in February (or at least call witnesses at his Senate trial). They chose to remain silent, hoping that the political capital they built by supporting a dictator wannabe could be used for their own personal agenda. This week, they realized that wasn't going to happen, so fled like rats from a sinking ship, praying that they should save their tarnished political career or at least emerge with a shred of dignity. The timing is incredibly depressing, and Twitter's action feels the same to me.

I am an advocate for free speech and I hate to see mobs forming around people hoping to deplatform and "cancel" their enemies... but I learned this week that I have a lot to think about. It is sad to me that a veteran who served four tours of duty in the Air Force was shot dead in the United States Capitol, ending up in that unfortunate spot because of a constant barrage of misleading information from social media; literally egged on by the President of the United States.

We all have a lot of soul searching to do. I wish we didn't let it escalate to this point just to get some engagement numbers up.

I fully support the efforts to impeach President Trump, if for no other reason than to prevent him from being able to run again. I also support Twitter's right to kick him off their platform.

That said; it seems a stretch to me to permanently delete his account based on the two tweets they cite. They're about to break their necks trying to find problems in those two tweets when they have a smorgasbord of inflammatory tweets over the years to pick from. Saying he won't attend the inauguration was the final straw? It really seems disingenuous on their part.

I would respect them far more if they had said, "You know what? Our decision to reinstate his account after twelve hours was a mistake. Donald Trump is clearly harmful to our republic and we will no longer give him a voice on our platform. His account is therefore permanently suspended."

If anyone would like to discuss this in a live chat I've posted it to Sqwok - https://sqwok.im/p/Qc6NbMulLuK5PA

Finally ... ding dong the witch is dead.

I would like to know how much revenue Twitter and Facebook made off of this POS. Doubtful we will ever hear such things.

I think the extremely online political junkies vastly overestimate the amount of money Twitter derives from Donald Trump's tweets. Most people just use Twitter to follow their friends and celebrities and don't hang on to his every word.

They were mostly refraining from taking a harder line on Trump because they were worried about retaliation from the Republicans. Now that Trump's out office and the Democrats control all three branches that's no longer a concern for them.

You could be totally correct. I would like to know though.

I think you think it lower than me and I think it higher than you. Ha. Just good that he is gone.

Maybe not directly, but there's no denying that he drives engagement metrics from all sides. Engaging products are stickier, and thus drives product teams intensely to continue doing so.

Of course we've seen intense polarization because of this, but all that aside it's easy to see why a company beholden to shareholders would hesitate for so long.

> I would like to know how much revenue Twitter and Facebook made

I would assume not that much, unless the ads being shown to his followers were for extended mags, American flags, MAGA hats, or truck nuts.

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