Angela Merkel blasts Twitter's decision to permanently suspend Trump's account | Hacker News Reader

Angela Merkel blasts Twitter's decision to permanently suspend Trump's account

cnbc.com

36 pointsjimmy202022 comments

Throw away.

What I find so funny is the hypocrisy of all these co’s.

During growth, no morals at all. Once at the top, suddenly the arbiter of honesty and righteousness.

Reddit - How long did they let /r/creepshots /r/jailbait and more run wild before shutting down? When it was convenient economically with investors and growth numbers? Only after a bad article was written?

Amazon - Make a list of all the businesses AWS have massive enterprise contracts with. How many do you think are with awful organizations/governments? How much other small business terrible content is hosted on their platform?

Twitter - Flip flop when politically convenient on basically everything. Moments, search, comments are all literally designed where if you click any important political conversation the most inflaming reply is at the top. Then pretend “enough is enough” now. That the discourse is not a result of themselves?

Facebook - Built an entire business around encouraging what Cambridge Analytica did then come out and pretend to care about privacy and shocked that ‘they abused out platform’.

Google - Their ad platform is basically Cambridge Analytica. What consent do people actually think they are giving? The company’s goal is to basically be one giant “thisisyourdigitallife” app.

YouTube - Algorithms that radicalize but generate profit are okay, but then be outraged by it. Kidding me...

Box.com (similar non-info based tech co’s) - I’ve seen them tweet politics constantly from a high horse of morals. Let’s see a list of all their enterprise clients? I’m sure none of these growth tech service co’s do business with awful people, organizations, governments?

It’s time to point the finger in the mirror folks.

>>Once at the top, suddenly the arbiter of honesty and righteousness.

I'd say more like "covering their asses and protecting their profits"...But since when is that anything new? Companies only care about money. If we have issues with that, we should probably start by not letting them contribute to political campaigns.

This is the nature of risk. Non-incumbents are always willing to take more risk as they have less to lose. If there isn't a "law" formalized for this there should be, it's as hypocritical as gravity. It's practically a natural law up there with "power grows power" and "capital builds capital".

Hey, mang, your comment was deaded and it looks like you're shadowbanned, but your history looks clean. If you care, contact the site admins to de-ban.

Personally, for sinister reasons I like what FB/Twitter and other high profile companies are doing right now. All this meddling with politics, openly taking sides and censoring based on arbitrary rules like a cesar pointing thumb up and down - I'm pretty convinced (and I hope!) that especially for "social media" giants this will sooner or later backfire and will be one of reasons of their demise, improvement or at least significant reduction of influence.

All of this serves as reminder that not necessarily full and true picture could be visible when looking through social media lens, at the same time it's sad because it increases doubts,distrust and divides society even more - certain and looking at votes count - pretty big one - part of society could feel that there is no common ground for discussion,they are not welcome, have to find or create their own platform (bubble).

I think that one of reasons why social media is that messy is the reach, it appears that it's the curse and the blessing at same time - it makes local issues global ones, it allows to form a mob, mass where individual voices and meaningful discussion is impossible. This is visible even here on HN, sometimes there are massive threads with thousands of comments and while plenty are insightful and valuable I have feeling that some threshold is crossed and it no longer make sense to read and comment there.

I agree with @pxtail that these companies will hopefully get what's coming to them. But on another note, their flagrant behavior only highlights the immense power that old media had before the Internet became as big as it is today. Just as in the past, media companies hold massive sway over the opinions of regular folk, and in all this time the law has not evolved to challenge that power in any way.

The thing I dislike most about Trump's presidency is that it shone a spotlight so bright on DC that lawmakers and politicians that no one would have cared for otherwise have become celebrities, which doesn't bode well for the future, as any organization that controls the mediums these celebrities use to gain followers and boost their platform holds power over them.

It is Facebook that gets to decide whether or not you will even get a chance at getting elected, it is Twitter that gets to decide if you even exist outside of your local city, it is Amazon that gets to decide if you even get a website to host your platform. Obviously these aren't the only ones but you see the point I'm trying to make, which is that politics have become a televised drama, and these tech companies are the Executive Producers.

Isn't Germany on of the countries that at least had plans on making social media companies responsible for what their users post on their sites. If I remember correctly they were even proposing massive fines if content that they deemed illegal was not removed within an hour and even holding the executives criminally responsible for the content that any of their users post? I'm not sure did they actually go that far but they were at least proposing it.

So on the one hand they are saying that companies need to strictly control what users say on their platform and if they get it wrong they are criminals, but on the other hand they shouldn't control what is said on their platform?

I think the point here is "content that they deemed illegal". There is one authority that mediates between the needs and ideologies of all participants in society, and that's the state. The state sets boundaries- publicly discussed, contracted, declared and approved- so that everyone is entirely free to do whatever they please inside those boundaries.

The case where private companies in an oligo or monopolistic environment decide what to censor and what to promote is entirely different.

Shouldn’t it be “content that they deemed illegal”

It's honestly quite scary to me how we're able to censor people off the internet from popular discourse. Yes, they're absolutely private companies with the ability to do what they need in service of profits and their own values but it's almost chilling to see how effective this can be on individuals/ideas.

On the flip side, there is a need for action against ideas and individuals that are dangerous to society...but should we really trust google, twitter, amazon, et al., to be the judge, jury and executioner for all this with an entirely invisible process? Are there not elected officials that we've explicitly given this power to?

I have little hope that the legal system will be adapted to the current technocratic society we currently live in given that the average age of someone in Congress is 58 and in the Senate it's 62. That said, if they ever get around to it, they should investigate "shadow banning." The ability to silence people without any notification or even any way for the effected party to prove it is pretty insidious and should have some regulation behind it. They can effectively skirt any public scrutiny and control the entire discourse of a country.

That was unexpected. Certainly no love lost between those two. Very impressive stand on the part of Merkel, shows some real backbone.

The title of this submission is hyperbolic.

Merkel did not "blast" Twitter's decision. According to the article, her spokesperson said Merkel "considers it problematic that the president’s accounts have been permanently suspended".

'The right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance,' Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s chief spokesman, told reporters in Berlin on Monday."

Are we going to see many federating Mastodon instances run by various Govts? That would be interesting. French Govt already has its own Matrix instance I believe.

Article title on cnbc.com:

Germany’s Merkel hits out at Twitter over ‘problematic’ Trump ban

HN guideline:

> ... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

I support the suspension of Trump's twitter, but I have to preface this and say that I only support the decision in the context of the system we have right now. When the official position of the white house is demonstrably false and incites violence something has to be done.

We should not forget however that you could argue that the current situation was caused by Twitter/Facebook in the first place. The algorithms that optimize engagement played a large part in amplifying Trump's, and others, voices.

There is lots of discussion of whether Twitter should be thought of as a public square where every idea is free, a newspaper where opinions are curated, or something else entirely. I personally think that it is something new, and we need long policy discussions on how platforms should be regulated. No matter what happens the decision to or not to regulate platforms/big tech and how it should be done is going to be one of the most important policy decisions of the decade.

How is saying "problematic" = "blasting"???

"He [her speaker] added that governments, not private companies, should decide on any limitations to freedom of speech." So it's more a critic of the US government than of Twitter. And if the government doesn't act, it's up to someone else, in this case social media companies to do something, isn't it? If Trump wasn't the president, he would have been banned way before and with good reason. Germany knows there is a difference between "freedom of speech" and letting everyone say whatever they want no matter what damage it heralds.

Europe has a different conception of free speech and censorship than we do.

Censorship is acceptable and desired in Europe. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc., all censor entire categories of speech and types of speech, including for example criticism of religion in Germany, or expressions of religion in France (to cite opposing examples). Free speech in Europe is really just what the government says is free; the default assumption being that the government has the right to censorship speech unless it is shown to warrant free speech protections.

In the U.S., freedom of speech is presumed. Censorship is only allowed by the government if the government can show that restrictions on speech are warranted, and in such case the restrictions must be limited to those necessary to address the reasons for placing the restrictions. But, censorship by private parties is allowed without restraint (accepting certain physical facilities like shopping centers) because not speaking is regarded as speech in the U.S.

So, Germany's criticism flows from their belief that the government should get to decide what gets censored, and not understanding that in the U.S., individuals and companies get to make that choice for themselves.

I don't even know where to start...

Please update title, its incorrect

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