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Comment by Erlich_Bachman | Hacker News Reader

What they quote is the tweet

“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.

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I suggest you read Twitter's whole article. It explains, and it's not what you think.

I read Twitter's whole article, and it seems to be exactly what GP thinks. The article is full of weasel words like "can be interpreted as" or "could be taken to mean". It does not point to any single actual example of inciting violence.

What do you mean? What does it explain? It literally says they interpreted those sentences as incitement to violence?

> That was literally 1 of two tweets that god him banned

> 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.

I strongly believe the goal post of online censorship should be incitement of violence or obvious hatespeech. The rest will always be open to interpretation, that will depend on the biases of the censors. It seems to me this is the case here. There is nothing in his (other) tweets that incites violence.

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.

Who is Twitter? They own and operate Twitter, and are the final arbiters for what is allowed on Twitter.

You could make a decent argument that twitter and the other social giants have more real power than most countries' governments on this planet. The whole reason we think governments shouldn't censer speech is specifically because they are so powerful, and while you may like who's in power today, good luck trying to keep it that way.

Which is exactly the reason why Twitter should be allowed to set it's own moderation rules. Who else is going to tell Twitter what they can and cannot moderate? The only other people who can is the government and then you have a situation where the government is now controlling speech.

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.

That they're only doing it now that trump is leaving office maybe suggests the opposite - that government does have a lot of control

My interpretation is that isn't that they were fearful of government control but rather welcomed the controversy to their platform as it resulted in more eyeballs on their inlined advertisements.

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).

True. And if you remember all those hearings where they pretty much forced those Twitter/FB/Amazon/Google CEOs where they berated them like little kids. Those CEOs didn't really object much and knew they could get in a lot of trouble if they did so. Unfortunately, Trump could hurt those companies if he wanted I'm sure. Just look at what happened to Huawei, now the writing is on the wall for DJI and some others. I'm sure those CEOs were just biding their time waiting for Trump to go (and now they decided to act where it is obvious that he's done).

The argument boils down to: if freedom of speech is the freedom to speak in the town square, could we ever have a situation where social media is the Town Squre of today?

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.

The question is: should it remain so?

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.

They are in their rights to delete whatever they want. Making an accusation of illegal conduct and deleting the evidence goes beyond that, though.

> deleting the evidence

What, you don't think they have copies along with an enormous number of other people?

The millions of people reading the accusations in the newspapers can not easily check the accusations. That is the issue.

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.

Someone that thinks a newspaper is making up a tweet can handle the couple minutes of effort to find it somewhere else.

It's no more effort than looking up something in a speech or a press conference.

But the one tweet is not the issue, they say. It is the one tweet in the context of all his tweets. I mean the one tweet only said "I won't attend the inauguration".

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.

> But the one tweet is not the issue, they say. It is the one tweet in the context of all his tweets.

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.

There's good censorship and bad censorship: eg not having inappropriate content broadcast on shows kids are likely to watch (good censorship) vs the government dictating how current affairs are reported in the news (bad censorship).

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.

Not having inappropriate content broadcast on shows kids are likely to watch is government-mandated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law

Of course it is -- who else would it be?

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".

> The rest will always be open to interpretation, that will depend on the biases of the censors.

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!

> is now clear incitement of violence. It's knowledge we have after the fact.

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 has happened before the other one?

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.

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 strongly believe the goal post of online censorship should be incitement of violence or obvious hatespeech.

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.

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