Angela Merkel calls Trump Twitter ban 'problematic'

Half the people believe America is overrun by the nazis or the fascist. And they the heroes fighting them, and when people from other countries look at them weirdly, when people who understand and felt what an oppressive regime does to a man, say what are you talking about, they double down.

It would be a fun experiment to see how many times those two words occur on average daily on HN.

And the escalation is actually welcome news to Trump. It supports his narrative of being the enemy of the "deep state" and the "swamp".

Sidestepping the moral question of whether the bans are deserved or not, they are a huge strategic mistake that will strengthen the very same people they try to silence.

Just wait until we're talking in a few years about "Why extremist candidate X won" like the many "Why Trump won" threads we saw 4 years ago.

It’s unfortunate but maybe the tech balkanization has an inverse Conway’s law effect.

Also now that half the country’s internet population will be free from big tech control, imagine all the truth that can now be discussed out in the open without restriction on alternative platforms.

> The media has ruined America. Game over.

MSM, including Facebook and Twitter, empowered this monster and profited from it. This joke of a candidate was propped up and put front and centre instead of being ignored. They fed the Troll and moments before he turns to stone, they take credit for cutting him off.

The final straw for me was in 2016 when he was nominated. I deleted all social media and actively avoided US news--even then I'd hear conversations about it everywhere--even outside of the US.

Good luck America, you'll need it.

Well, they had two options: 1) Do what they did, and inflame some of the pro-Trump types with thinking that he and they are being persecuted and oppressed. Or 2) let Trump keep the megaphone (MAGAphone?) and hope that in the next 10 days he didn't say anything that would inflame some of the pro-Trump types into thinking that they had to violently try to reverse the result of the "stolen" election.

Note that there is no option that doesn't leave a segment of the pro-Trump crowd inflamed, angry, and perhaps looking for trouble.

Let cooler heads prevail is good advice. Except in this situation, cooler heads already were not prevailing.

Did you miss the part where the Confederate flag was among the flags Capitol Hill rioters were waving?

I think it's entirely possible that de-platforming will actually have the effect of de-escalating. It's like putting a child in timeout: it gives the child a moment to cool off before resuming normal activity. Clearly people's passions are inflamed at the moment and they were feeding off each other's anger. Some time off may allow cooler heads to prevail, even if it's just the time it takes parler to set up an alternative infrastructure.

Of course, I may be completely wrong about this, but it's not clear to me that this is a worse option than doing nothing.

Does make you wander when the head of a state with all the limitations you have enumerated says you have gone too far?

You miss the point. In america you are non stop partial and confro tational, to the point of lying all the time, at THE MEDIA LEVEL. The journalist are merely an extension of your partys.

This was before trump. Trump used it and abused it and went to the extrem but he didnt create the problem.

What merkel says here, is that Big Tech is now playing the same game to the extrem too. This is not gonna end well.

You need to be back to more objectivity.

That is her point: this power belongs to government, not to corporations. DW did not include that part, but other outlets did: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-11/merkel-se...

>“The chancellor sees the complete closing down of the account of an elected president as problematic,” Steffen Seibert, her chief spokesman, said at a regular news conference in Berlin. Rights like the freedom of speech “can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature -- not according to a corporate decision.”

If the POTUS wouldn't have kept breaking Twitters TOS service daily, he wouldn't have been banned. The same policy which applies to everyone else. Twitter also isn't "America", it's a private company that can ban whatever unprotected category of people it wants to do. Also I'm pretty sure Germany still has bands on much Nazi propaganda and paraphernalia as a whole.

Trump is free to have a press conference and take questions at any time.

A company bans a malicious user who happens to be President of the United States and that's the lowest we've ever stooped?

I'm sorry, have you met us? In the ways in which we've gone against everything we meant in the world, I'd think at least all the torture prisons we ran would be a lot higher on the list than this.