The fact that he's being censored based on how some people interpreted what he said is troubling.
John Lennon was murdered because of how someone interpreted Catcher In the Rye. Do we need to lock up Salinger for inciting violence too?
John Lennon was murdered because of how someone interpreted Catcher In the Rye. Do we need to lock up Salinger for inciting violence too?
This is patently disingenuous. Twitter didn't jail the President for inciting violence. They said he wasn't allowed to Tweet anymore.
Could the publisher of Catcher in the Rye have decided to stop publishing it based on that? Yes, they could.
You're also willfully ignoring the fact that _just before_ those tweets the President had incited a violent insurrection that attacked Congress and then praised them saying: "we love you" and "you're special". As I said before, we don't have to be blind to the prior context. This reductionist thinking that we must take these two tweets entirely on their own and devoid of context isn't something I'm going to participate in.
And we have a justice system to deal with insurrectionists and we have a democratic process with our elected representatives to remove leaders from office. This involves due process and respecting rights honed over 200 years of jurisprudence. It's not done in a corporate backroom by a couple executives with zero public accountability.
Would you be equally supportive if Twitter had deployed a private army of mercenaries to police the Capitol? What's happening here is the digital equivalent. You're busy thanking them because you support what they did. Some of us are stepping back and asking the question: wait, who controls these soldiers and what checks and balances are there on their power to police us? It turns out Twitter owns them and the checks and balances are none. If that doesn't concern you then you're missing the big picture.
I'm done with this conversation as it doesn't seem to be productive or in good faith.
It’s clear that once something like a violent insurrection happens the companies previously giving a platform to the one who incited the insurrection are going to give a lot less leeway on anything he says.
Seems odd that this is seemingly hard to understand. If the violence didn’t happen, and he wrote those two tweets he’d still be on Twitter.
But it did happen and that’s changed the game
Lots of violence happened during the protests this summer too. Should we assume that everyone tweeting about being peaceful then was also sending coded messages supporting the violence?
Are we really going to go with the logic that violence occurred, therefore anything tweeted prior to the violence was an incitement to the violence? And if it appeared to say the opposite of that, then it was actually a coded message that means whatever is politically convenient for us to have it mean?
Propaganda over the ages has been studied very closely, there are known techniques. His incitement speech was a textbook example [1]. Why on earth would anyone give him the benefit of the doubt? He’s a wannabe tyrant.
[1] https://twitter.com/sethabramson/status/1347908845281095680 - A good deep dive on his incitement speech
So it is spectacularly, flagrantly, and most of all utterly unconvincing to suggest that he - I don't know - misspoke? Didn't mean it? Was widely and unfortunately misinterpreted by an angry crowd he just happened find himself in front of with kindness and good will to all men in his heart?
None of that is even remotely plausible.
Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, etc are perfectly justified in shutting him up, for the safety of all Americans, and very possibly the rest of the world.
Once we've dealt with this threat, we can come back and have a debate about media control in all of its forms. And when we do that we can include the trad media too, because they have a lot to answer for.
But for now there are more pressing problems. Whether or not Twitter did the right thing isn't anywhere close to the top of the list.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-warns-s...
A tech company banning a user isn’t equivalent to a new law on the statute either.
If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote. We only get to choose from a pre-approved list of options that all have to conform to whatever Twitter and Facebook deem is acceptable. Twitter and Facebook et al are unelected and accountable to no one. That's not democracy. That's a corporate dictatorship with sham elections.
I really haven't. Trump is the only western leader to have been banned from the mainstream social media platforms. You can't claim this is the thin end of the wedge, this is a reaction [by those platforms] to the risks to western democracy in its entirety. They gave him four years of rope to hang himself with, it was only a direct attack on democracy itself that caused this action.
> If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote.
Trump has all the means of communication that any previous president has had. All he has to do is stand at a lectern and talk and it will be broadcast on national television.
Again, he wouldn't have lost the access that he had if he hadn't tried to directly attack the entire system of democracy itself. All the other lies he's told over the years were allowed to be seen.
> corporate dictatorship
That's a laughable leap, sorry. If he hadn't incited a violent insurrection, and if he wasn't a few days away from the end of his tenure then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Let me put this another way. Do you think everybody, no matter what harms they cause, deserve a voice on all platforms? Would you expect Twitter to host the voice of Hitler?
Ultimately, they are private companies, they have no obligation to balance, fairness, access. It seems the state forcing corporations to do their bidding would be far more of a slippery slope than the president, who has tried to actually destroy democratic process, being banned from a platform.
How is it it's clear to so many people on the left that Trump was inciting violence, when that wasn't the case for most of his supporters?
I mean it's not like the guy ever killed anyone. /s