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Comment by veilrap | Hacker News Reader

The president of the United States should be treated no differently than other users of the service.

In this case the president repeatedly broke the rules by posting lies and dangerous misinformation. Even given that, his account was allowed to continue to break the rules for far longer than normal peoples would have been.

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The parent said it’s only bigotry, the kind you’d find at Stormfront, etc, that gets you banned. So now it’s “misinformation”? Who is the arbiter of that? Which authority gets to judge that?

>Who is the arbiter of that? Which authority gets to judge that?

The owner(s) of the platform or service. As per the terms of service you agreed to in exchange for an account on that platform or service.

You forgot to mention he was banned for the insurrection. "...due to the risk of further incitement of violence..." Was their reasoning, and I think it probably prevented more violence.

I agree. Honestly, since we're talking about Trump's personal account (not even the official @POTUS account) I think he should have been banned much earlier.

I'm just pointing out that the slippery slope argument of "who gets to decide what is an isn't disinformation" on a specific platform which always gets brought up in this case has an obvious answer.

What about all the people using the platform to organize and normalize the BLM riots and looting?

A lot of them got banned? You should always report when you see people planning violence if that is what you are saying you saw.

But what about all the people banned for “misinformation” regarding Covid lab leak, etc? That was not misinformation it turns out.

The platform is pressured to arbitrate a certain way and is a political tool. Musk opening up speech will be a breath of fresh air.

There was a huge spike in unsolicited assaults on Asian americans and asian immigrants so you can see the incitement of further violence logic even if that was so much more nebulous and indirect. Private company and all. Twitter should be nationalized if the first amendment has to apply.

So you can’t criticize China because Asians Americans will see a spike in violence?

> But what about all the people banned for “misinformation” regarding Covid lab leak, etc? That was not misinformation it turns out.

The lab leak hypothesis - or rather the various theories and conspiracies that get grouped under that banner - remain just that as far as I know. I'm willing to consider it misinformation given that the obvious purpose of much of it was to implicate that the Democratic Party/WHO/Fauci in some kind of bioweapons conspiracy or feed off of anti-Chinese xenophobia. But certainly, given that it remains unproven, I would consider claims to the contrary to be misinformation.

And... what about them? Were they lined up against a wall and shot or something? Were they sent to camps? Were their homes raided and their literature burned? As far as I can tell discourse in this area never even faltered anywhere online, it continued and continues unabated still.

I think banning it makes it worse. Now they really think it’s a conspiracy. There’s always going to be stupid ideas around things. You can’t just ban it.

We can't base all of our decision making processes on whether or not they justify the delusions of the paranoid, because anything besides normalizing and spreading their beliefs will. We're already seeing dangerous societal consequences as a result of the accelerated spread of falsehoods and conspiracy theories, so I have to disagree that turning the firehose on even harder is the best possible solution.

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