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Comment by kkoncevicius | Hacker News Reader

So according to this article big-tech fears the US government and do as they are told or at least react to cues about what and who should be censored. On the other hand - some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears.

What am I missing?

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> On the other hand - some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears.

Sure, they banned him after he lost the election and could no longer retaliate meaningfully against them, while his opponents were coming into power. I'm not sure why you would neglect that. Maybe they would banned him anyway, or maybe not. We can't evaluate that counterfactual, but what actually happened is consistent with the narrative.

>Sure, they banned him after he lost the election and could no longer retaliate meaningfully against them, while his opponents were coming into power.

What means of retaliation do you believe Trump would have had against social media platforms while in office? A President doesn't have the legal authority to simply outlaw companies they disagree with, nor do they have a right to a social media account, or to force businesses to accept them as a customer, or carte blanche to violate contracts or terms of service. Sign an executive order making it illegal to ban his accounts? Executive orders aren't laws, and Presidents aren't monarchs.

Meanwhile, as a billionaire celebrity even out of office, Trump remains perfectly capable of suing over his social media bans, which he is currently doing.

He can direct the justice department to investigate all sorts of possible infractions, costing them considerable money in legal fees, disrupting business activities, and causing negative PR. Trying to do any of this as the election loser it just comes across as sour grapes, and the justice department wouldn't follow any directions of this sort. And this is just scratching the surface.

Texas has been doing this to big tech

https://gizmodo.com/texas-big-tech-google-meta-social-media-...

That still doesn't make him unable to meaningfully retaliate, just unable to abuse Justice Department resources while doing so.

If your quibble is on what I specifically meant by "meaningfully retaliate", I think everyone understands that the threat of the full weight of the US government is "meaningful", where lawsuits from individuals are fairly routine for these companies and so I wouldn't count those as particularly meaningful by comparison.

Why couldn't he retaliate after he lost the election?

I said "meaningfully retaliate", not just "retaliate". I address this further below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32939850

Either one, why wouldn't he be able to? Nothing changes post election until jan 20th

For one example, the justice department is not going to act on directives from a President that will simply be overruled in two weeks when the next President comes into power, it's just a waste of resources. They'll take the paperwork but they'll just sit on it.

Is that a guarantee or is it possible they would follow his orders?

Also it's 6 weeks and the executive doesn't control the justic department how would it be overruled?

The previous president was banned after he no longer had political power.

While literally true, this doesn’t accurately reflect the immediate circumstances that led him to be banned. In other words: it’s not true that his lack of political power was the thing that got him banned.

Also to say he lacks political power is objectively false. While he's no longer in office, for sure, he still wields tremendous political power.

He was a) the current president and b) politically powerful enough to trigger an attack on Congress. It's a little silly to pretend he was somehow a powerless private citizen on Jan 6. The man remains politically powerful today; see his impact on the current Republican primaries as an example.

Anything he could have done at that moment would simply have been undone by the incoming administration.

You can't "undo" political violence or political pardons, which are among the numerous things he did in his final days in power.

> What am missing?

The article isn’t about big tech or why they comply. It is about the US Government employing a proxy (wittingly or not) to violate The Constitution of The United States of America and conceal that activity.

It would be wild if we find out he was also banned in a similar manner to this Berenson guy.

As for what you’re missing, maybe that Trump was too anti-establishment, like his “drain the swamp” rhetoric? Based on the article this seems like it would be a systemic issue.

As Bob Dylan sang, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

They banned Trump when he was on the way out, and an administration still very hostile to him and his supporters was on the way in.

The wind was obviously blowing in a different direction on Dec 11 when all 50 states had certified their elections. Why wasn’t he banned then?

Even if in your heart-of-hearts you wanted to ban Trump, I don't think you'd do it then -- seems like bad strategy w/ the various legal challenges to the election still in play.

All legal challenges to the election were over on Dec 11. The last of the last ditch, hail Mary efforts was the Texas case, which was rejected by SCOTUS on Dec 11. With that rejection and the certification from all 50 states, that was the key day that the winds changed definitively. Instead of banning him on that day, Twitter banned him on Jan 8, after he had used Twitter to organize a violent coup attempt on Jan 6. I think Occam's razor tells us we should accept that Twitter banned Trump for the obvious and proximal cause, rather than some hypothetical effort to curry political favor that predates the inauguration of the new administration, but postdates the new administration's certainty.

Ah, my bad on the timing. Thanks for the correction.

Still, I think my logic still holds; if they banned him out of the blue right as the winds changed, it would be obviously political; by waiting for a casus belli (as it were), they can credibly claim non-political reasons.

Nothing. These companies are about making a profit. Anarchy and excess deaths both reduce profits. This explains their actions very easily.

> some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears.

No it didn't. It tolerated all types of behavior from and around him (that wasn't tolerated from other people) until the last possible second that he could have a say about anything, then it immediately banned him to please the new regime. Trump literally assassinated an Iranian general I believe largely because that general would humiliate Trump in twitter fights, not banned. New regime? Banned.

No, he was banned before the new regime, but immediately after he was implicated in an attempted coup.

"Coup" over the introduction of a new regime. If your beliefs rely on Trump being powerful enough in the last days of his term to be a threat to a FAANG company in good stead with the incoming regime, your beliefs are fragile.

With the current lobbying and campaign funding rules, government is more or less a consortium of big businesses. What exactly does business have to fear, when all the branches of government are full of their own representatives?

You can’t both assert that the government doesn’t serve the people AND government doesn’t serve businesses. I agree that it is an unreasonable premise.

What would be the point of influencing government if it had no power over you?

The reverse is true as well. What would be the point of influencing government if it gave you no power over it?

It’s rather circular, I imagine.

> What am I missing?

Prior political allegiances of said companies.

> some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president

Honestly that makes it worse - they appear to be following orders given by a specific political party but ignore those given by the other.

Not much. The article's premise is bunk: that private media is required to ignore the underlying truth-value of the US government's positions and re-derive every public policy position for itself.

It's also completely in tension with one of the oldest traditions of the executive branch, which is calling up whichever executive(s) you'd like and wailing on them a bit. Can you imagine Tablet writing a similar article about all the companies that the previous administration publicly excoriated for failing to comply with their domestic economic agenda?

I mean, you can skim the emails here [1].

Maybe individual messages are kind of okay, but all together it definitely reads like policing of private speech. The inter-agency communications in particular are pretty bad.

[1]: https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-State...

Can you point to the ones you think are particularly bad?

I'm looking through the actual emails (starting on page 147), and so far I see:

* A public health agency (CDC) receiving media reports ("CrowdTangle content insights") from Facebook. Maybe there's some question about propriety, but that isn't itself evidence of censorship -- the direction there is entirely private-to-public.

* Someone at the CDC responding to Facebook, thanking them for sending those media reports (p. 164).

* Lots of coordination about who to send the reports to (about 30 pages of just that).

* Finally, a lot of not-particularly-objectionable public information about vaccines: that they don't contain microchips, etc.

Critically, I can't find any references to the "Great Barrington Declaration" or evidence that the CDC went beyond communicating public health policy to a handful of companies. It's entirely possible that I missed it in this 700 page PDF, so please let me know if you find it.

I wasn’t referring to Great Barrington Declaration, so unclear to me why that is critical.

For ex: p516 is a request from a redacted sender in which the sender shares an elections-related post and then asks to know how it was handled. The message footer references CISA policy. I think the tone is a little strange and could be reasonably construed as a way to work around the policy of not seeking action laid out in the message footer.

> I wasn’t referring to Great Barrington Declaration, so unclear to me why that is critical.

Because it's the crux of TFA. Without evidence that the Federal Government pressured companies to spike information they considered unfavorable, this is just a big pile of emails between bureaucrats and office workers.

The email on p. 516 exemplifies this: someone in USG is asking Meta how they responded to a local government report. They're not asking for any specific action from Meta, and there's no evidence in the replies that Meta's employees construed the request as a demand to do anything.

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