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Comment by tyleo | Hacker News Reader

I agree with both POV here. It _is_ disgusting to see Big Tech playing politics. However, I don’t think Trump’s ban has much to do with that. He simply broke the rules.

Probably the thing that makes me saddest about the whole debacle is that there seems to be less and less room for valid conservative viewpoints. I lean conservative but it seems that the priorities of the Republican Party have changed from advancing conservative politics to defending Trump at all costs. Sadly I cannot support that and therefore, I cannot support the party.

I think I’m in a small boat here but if anyone else feels this way I hope you can take a little comfort from this comment and knowing you are not alone.

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The madness affects both sides. I lean liberal and the insanity and obsession with Trump and turning him into a boogeyman has me no longer supporting the left.

Thanks for bringing that up. I wholeheartedly agree with you. I am currently a reliable democratic voter but I wasn’t always on that side of the aisle. The idea of fiscal conservatism really appeals to me in the sense of a balanced budget and judiciously defined social programs that maximize ROI for the country. But social conservatism has been a pretty big moral failure, rooted in a number of moral panics. What exactly is wrong with being gay? Or trans? Or a woman? Or black? That part really became hard to swallow. But even if I ignored that, the GOP basically sold their soul for Trump’s Twitter following and at this point has no actual platform. Between 2017 and 2021 they racked up more national debt than any other government so even the pretense of fiscal responsibility is gone now. I know that supporting Democrats isn’t palatable to a lot of traditionally conservative voters but I am glad some are seeing more clearly what’s going on.

However, I don’t think Trump’s ban has much to do with that. He simply broke the rules.

Facebook's oversight board disagrees. They ruled that Trump's ban was "indeterminate and standardless", and that the correct response should be "consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform".

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56985583

It's quite obvious he broke no actual rules, but it's interesting that Facebook's oversight board is actually willing to say so. Of course, they nonetheless 'allowed' Facebook to continue the ban.

> It's quite obvious he broke no actual rules, but it's interesting that Facebook's oversight board is actually willing to say so.

Where are you reading that? I see no reference to it in the linked article.

I just quoted from the article. Are you seeing a different web page to me? The 5th paragraph says:

The Oversight Board said the initial decision to permanently suspend Mr Trump was "indeterminate and standardless", and that the correct response should be "consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform".

And the first paragraph says:

Donald Trump's ban from Facebook and Instagram has been upheld by Facebook's Oversight Board.

That does not say what you're claiming it does. The article is very clearly talking about the response to Trump:

> correct response should be "consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform".

That's the entire focus of the article is a consistent response from Facebook. It makes absolutely no mention of the action that precipitated the response.

But their response was to ban him, which means the response consistent with the rules applied to other people would have yielded no ban.

Uhuh... which says absolutely nothing about what rules he broke. I'm not sure what part of that you're getting hung up on.

I also don't understand quite why there's disagreement here, so perhaps it's best to just end it here. From my perspective what the oversight board says is simple: Trump was banned, but not because he broke any actual rule, as evidenced by the fact that everyone else on the platform can do the same things and not be banned.

Perhaps you're interpreting it differently as: he broke a rule, which happens to only be enforced against people named Donald Trump. Well, most people wouldn't recognize such things as genuine rules, which is probably why the oversight board had such difficulty with it.

There's absolutely nothing that needs to be interpreted here. The article - and even the specific sentence you quoted - make it clear that its discussing the response to a user's actions and not the actions themselves. I'm not saying Trump did or did not break a rule, but neither did this article. You're completely inventing the notion that Trump's actions were discussed.

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