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Comment by ve55 | Hacker News Reader

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)

View on HN

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?

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.

>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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

In other words:

Never let a good crises go to waste.

>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

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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.)

>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.

Because it's political.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

(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?

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.

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.

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

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.

>(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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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