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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

> Problematically, companies’ community standards also often feature exceptions for public figures: That’s why the president of the United States can tweet hateful things with impunity, but an ordinary user can’t.

I'm kind of disappointed that the EFF never issued a correction or retraction for this claim.

> users being censored for engaging in counterspeech or for using reclaimed terms

A few paragraphs up, weren't they saying it was a bad thing that different rules apply to different people? Now they're saying it's a bad thing if the same rules apply to everyone?

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> A few paragraphs up, weren't they saying it was a bad thing that different rules apply to different people? Now they're saying it's a bad thing if the same rules apply to everyone?

Or they're saying that the rules themselves are problematic, and more sophistication is needed than just "this word is not allowed."

> I'm kind of disappointed that the EFF never issued a correction or retraction for this claim.

What kind of correction or retraction would you be looking for? That is explicitly Twitter policy[1].

Trump may have eventually crossed a line. That doesn't mean his line was in the same place as other people's.

[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/public-intere...

Also someone proved this experimentally just by tweeting out the same things that Trump did and got banned https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/bot-banned-from-...

Of course the line isn't the same for everyone. Some people (such as presidents) are a lot more influential and consequential than others. Nobody cares what Joe Random thinks about something and if he crosses a line nobody cares if he's silenced.

Trump isn't the only one who had a different line, though his was probably looser than anyone else got. Any celebrity or public figure is going to have more leeway in what he or she is allowed to say.

> A few paragraphs up, weren't they saying it was a bad thing that different rules apply to different people.

No, the rule is you can’t use reclaimed slurs unless you’re part of the group targeted by them. So yeah, you don’t get to call someone who’s gay a fa__ot unless you are gay yourself. That’s like the whole point of reclaiming them.

The issue is that a dumb keyword filter can’t properly enforce this.

It’s not just a dumb keyword filter that can’t enforce this. It’s not enforceable. Period.

Are we going to have the content moderation team guess the sexual preferences of random twitter accounts?

This is, practically, unenforceable.

trump tweeted all kinds of things that would get a normal user banned. you should retract your comment.

My whole point is that he did get banned, and "with impunity" basically means "without getting banned or otherwise punished".

Only after he was no longer President. If he had won the election, he would still be spewing on Twitter. And now he is again.

> Only after he was no longer President.

No, he was still President when he got banned.

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