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Comment by garyrichardson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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