Twitter themselves go into it in detail. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
Essentially, supporting a violent insurrection into the capital building was the line.
Essentially, supporting a violent insurrection into the capital building was the line.
Anyone who lives in a world where
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!!!
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-his-allies-set-the-st...
Hypothetically speaking, the tension could die down over the next few weeks and the context could become a single violent protest against the background of BLM. The right wing are not known for competently organising sustained protests. There is a future here where unless something surprising happens Twitter gets a lot of egg on their face for, in a panic, ejecting a sitting president for things that are pretty banal when read literally.
Twitter accepting this risk is not something that bodes well for them.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-trump-fans-descent-into-the...
"Hey, I need my digital soldiers to show up on January 6".
"We fight like hell".
"And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore".
I also remember something along the lines of it's going to be wild on January 6.
Some of this was live, some on twitter.
The point is that the effect of what you say is what people hear, and these people obviously hear him (and other nationalist thought leaders) speak of a battle for the soul of the country (based on lies).
That is the natural effect of the kind of rhetoric he uses.
I don't care about Target, they can deal with it. But it ruined lives, some of which were lost, of many normal day to day people that are just like you and me.
https://jonathanturley.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/CNN-He...
I happen to be of controversial opinion that the lives of normal people are more important than those of lying politicians, who provoke the violence among the former for their own political gains and profit.
Quoting from the Secret Service press release:
"Some demonstrators repeatedly attempted to knock over security barriers, and vandalized six Secret Service vehicles. Between Friday night and Sunday morning, more than 60 Secret Service Uniformed Division Officers and Special Agents sustained multiple injuries from projectiles such as bricks, rocks, bottles, fireworks and other items. Secret Service personnel were also directly physically assaulted as they were kicked, punched, and exposed to bodily fluids. A total of 11 injured employees were transported to a local hospital and treated for non-life threatening injuries.”
And yet they managed to control the scene with no injuries to rioters and only one arrest.
Here is his full speech.
> I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
Trump is missing a shield here that most presidents enjoy. International leaders would still say polite things about Bush the Younger despite him doing objective global damage by leading the invasion of multiple countries. My read on why is because they see a risk that people committed to his policy legacy still hold power in the US government.
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
That's what he got banned for? I don't have all the details, but it sure looks similar to the autoritarian governments and police forces locking people up because "they know they meant it". There is no appeal to violence in that tweet. Just because some nutjob can interpret anything like an appeal, doesn't mean it's an appeal.
That was literally 1 of two tweets that god him banned, the first just describing a generic Trump tirade about his supporters. How can anyone honestly think this is democratic behavior to ban someone over two tweets that have no appeal to violence?
I don't care about pro-trump or anti-trump, but this is political censorship.
> two tweets
A huge number of commenters here said the obvious "yes, quoting selected tweets was unfortunate when it was clearly not those particular tweets alone that was the cause".
That's still true. It was useless messaging. Ignore the quoted tweets and read the rest. Or read them as (poor) examples only.
There is zero way that the message from Twitter should be interpreted literally as "these two tweets only are what caused Trump to be banned". Anyone who thinks that obviously doesn't interpret their message in a charitable way.
Or can you show anything? Can they do it? After all the criticism they received, they still can't produce a IoV tweets as evidence? This does not look questionable to you?
A question I have is - why am I even asked to be reading twitter's thoughts about a matter, instead of actual tweets or things that the account wrote? Who is twitter? Why should I care about their opinion, who gave them right to affect opinion? Why are they supposed to have the moral authority to decipher complex situations for me and tell me how I should understand one message or another? Who elected them? What was the democratic process behind it?
It is these questions that make the situation real shady, not the two tweets.
The ironic thing about this situation is that Twitter exercising their own judgement on what can and cannot be hosted on their platform is actually a good thing for the demonstration of independence of social platforms from government control.
Trump's departure from office plus the riot was where the balance was tipped (ie Twitter's potential future income from Trump's controversies was no longer greater than the reputational cost in keeping him on the platform).
I think not. I just don't think we'll ever have functioning legal frameworks for that.
Basically: freedom of speech and expression will only apply to what you do with your mouth, in the street. "Speech at scale", such as social media, will simply not be able to be included in it.
That might seem like a pessimistic take, but I don't think it is. The alternative is democratically elected governments taking a greater role in social media, effectively claiming services to be part of the substrate of society (Twitter, Streets...). I don't like that idea either. The lesser evil seems like the first scenario: freedom of speech not including at scale.
Most jurisdictions have, for example, protections for renters. As in "the landlord cannot barge in at 2 a.m. and kick you out, even though the place is legally his/her".
This kind of legislation was motivated by an effort to protect weaker parties against capriciousness of stronger parties, even though the housing market is nowhere near to an oligopoly.
Now, a Star Chamber of Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Visa banning, e.g. a small business owner overnight will destroy his/her business without recourse and prevent it from getting on their feet again. In my opinion, this is even graver problem than a landlord kicking someone out at will.
What, you don't think they have copies along with an enormous number of other people?
Yes, copies of his tweets exist, although I am also not sure if they are legal. Iirc Twitter demands that downloaded Tweets are being deleted when they are being deleted on Twitter. Trump himself may have the rights to publish them, though.
It's no more effort than looking up something in a speech or a press conference.
They don't explicitly say what tweets are the actual reason for his termination.
I found an archive of Trump tweets. It consists of 50000 tweets. Finding tweets in there that somehow confirm the claims that he was calling for violence is more work than just a couple of minutes.
And getting all of them is as easy as getting a speech recording, if not easier.
> I found an archive of Trump tweets. It consists of 50000 tweets. Finding tweets in there that somehow confirm the claims that he was calling for violence is more work than just a couple of minutes.
The exact same thing happens if his twitter is unbanned and you go there for context. I'm not seeing the issue.
Ironically Twitter moderating their own platform is good censorship because it means they're able to operate independently from the government. The alternative is the government intervening and dictating what social platforms can and cannot publish...and that sounds a whole lot more shady than the complaint you're making.
Without wanting to get dragged into a parenting debate (those seldom go well on HN)...the problem we face is that adults should have the maturity to chose which content they consume where as children do need some degree of protection from some content. People will obviously disagree on exactly where that line should be drawn, which is fine, but few would argue that there shouldn't be a line in the first place.
The real crux of the distinction is that obscenity laws are about censoring artistic flourishes (nudity, graphic violence, bad language, etc) that many feel is unsuitable for children, rather than filtering news content that is subjectively deemed as "wrong" due to a political bias. If the US (or any other government for that matter) abused obscenity laws to filter content aimed at children to an extent that then pushes a political bias (for example) then such a censorship would shift from a "good thing" to a "bad thing".
Agree. We can't have censorship (or moderation) without bias and intepretation. The question is then whether we want biased moderation or no moderation.
> This does not look questionable to you
Not at all. I completely support Twitter's right (and decision) to make a subjective call. It's not an easy one, but given the circumstances I consider it correct.
> There is nothing in his (other) tweets that incites violence.
A public official falsely claiming (for example) that Trump "won the elction in a landslide" is now clear incitement of violence. It's knowledge we have after the fact. The violence already happened. The reason Trump wasn't banned for those same tweets earlier? Because those same messages could charitably be interpretated as hot air. And Twitter did use that interpretation. They are only seen as inciting violence after the violence.
One could argue that waiting with banning people for inciting violence until after the violence occurs is a ridiculously high bar!
Ehm, what is your logic behind that? That one event has happened before the other one? Since when is that enough of a "clear" statement? How do you go from that one correlation that you picked to somehow being sure of the causal (not only that, primary causal) connection between the two? Also how did you assign responsibility? Should marilyn manson's music be banned because a columbine shooter has listened to his music days before shooting up a school?
That one event happened due to the other one.
> Since when is that enough of a "clear" statement?
I think it's clear enough for these platforms to take action.
> Also how did you assign responsibility?
I think a large part of the responsibility lies with president, because of the power of the office.
> Should marilyn manson's music be banned because a columbine shooter has listened to his music days before shooting up a school?
No?
As I said elsewhere, I think the mistake in reasoning when objecting here is that people seem to think
a) There could be a rigid objective framework for how this should work. A simple "manual" for how companies should act in these situations instead of having to rely on subjective or biased decisions.
or
b) In the absence of such a framework, companies must instead never take any action because it risks being arbitrary/subjective/...
I think a) is impossible and b) is less desireable than arbitrary/subjective actions like these. That's all.
I want to add I also strongly believe this. But I also strongly believe that this situation isn't using (and shouldn't be using) the standards applied to an individual.
A US president with millions of followers, and a 14 day timeframe to the event, I think makes for an extraordinary situation that could require extraordinary action.
So to be clear: I think the bar here is, and should be, lower.