You mean the person who was the sitting president of the united states, who got deplatformed in unison by big tech social media, and is now fighting against censorship by using tech? Yeah, that is not relevant at all to hackernews /s
What did he do? What could he possibly have done, to get that to happen? It's like I wasn't sitting a mile from the capitol watching the WTOP national mall guy hiding behind a banister while the mob from his rally battered down the doors.
It's these consistent, subtle details that make the Trumpist propaganda so effective. The other side needs to start taking notes.
I agree, though, that it does sometimes sound like it's being hinted that something more nefarious was happening when people talk about it like this.
If there was anything nefarious going on it was Twitter, FB, etc. looking the other way because they knew that his violations of their terms was attracting attention and therefore making them money.
One of the primary issues is that Twitter has routinely granted privileged protected status to their favored political side, and refused to ban prominent people on the left that have behaved dramatically in violation of their policies [1][2]. There were a huge number of examples of it from the left during the unhinged Nick Sandermann cultural conflict for example (a wave of direct calls for violence by blue checkmarks against underage children).
Twitter has no qualms with unevenly applying their policies, so long as they're helping their political side. That has particularly been going on for four or five years non-stop at this point.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094762/spike-lee-sued-f...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-ap-top...
But as far as I could see, only seeing the former president's tweets in the news because I'm not a Twitter user, he was also granted protected status. So I fail to see it as some leftist conspiracy and find it more likely that Twitter just allows users that attract more attention this privileged status because it's in their best interest to do so.
Honestly, I don't know who Nick Sandermann is and could not care less about what Jane Fonda and Spike Lee are up to on Twitter. You've just pointed out some great examples of why I left it behind a long time ago.
However, as a US citizen, I do care what my president gets up to, even on social media. Given it's outsized influence on our society these days, I'm probably more interested in what the president is saying on social media, where he, and every other politician, seem to be able to get away with saying things they'd never have said on mainstream television or on traditional media not that long ago.
I've yet to see any other president ever behave that way on any social media platform so I have no point of reference to either dispute or agree with what you're saying.
And no, I'm not a reporter or an employee of a tech company, please keep your inferences about my character out of the conversation.
That's not what they're implying.
The implication is that if they can do it to the office-holder of one of the most powerful jobs in the world, they are very powerful and can do it to you.
> the narrative of social media being an organized supranational conspiracy
When lots of social media companies do the same thing at the same time, what other explanation is there?
Sorry how does that count as "fighting against censorship?" Sounds like they can censor any user that disparages their platform (the way that Trump regularly disparaged Twitter, on Twitter.)