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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> This rubs me the wrong way, nobody in government should be telling Twitter to remove speech.

Uh... Biden wasn't in government. It's so weird seeing all the posters in this thread arguing simultaneously that The Real Problem here is government control over the media and citing as evidence the fact that Twitter bent to the whims of someone not in government.

I mean, why is government control such a big deal when private citizens (like the Biden campaign, or this other guy who seems to have a lot of control over Twitter all of a sudden) can get the same favors? Either it matters or it doesn't, right?

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The real hilarious thing to me scrolling this sometime later is everyone is focused on Biden when the thread says the Trump team were doing the same thing and he was the President at the time! But crickets over that much stronger claim that it could be a first amendment violation.

Are people just being partisan or easily manipulated here?

Twitter’s censorship and selective enforcement of TOS to remove content was heavily slanted in favor of Democrats.

So? Even if that’s true we’re talking about accusations of violating the first amendment. If people accuse Biden of that when he wasn’t even in government surely it’s much worse that the sitting President at the time Trump did the same thing.

The fact that you bring up something tangential instead pretty much shows how people don’t want to treat this rationally.

Was Twitter biased, is Fox biased etc. doesn’t seem particularly relevant.

I wonder what it would look like if we strongly regulated news carriers to affect a particular partisan balance. If we had panels approve content-killing rules like terms of service. If the President could close down Twitter that way.

It's weirder to use the false equivalence to equate Biden with a typical private citizen. The typical private citizen does not have the same power to suppress stories on Twitter.

Because the first amendment covers congress's limitations on lawmaking. Thereby indirectly limiting executive and judicial actions in the same way.

It doesn't cover someone (regardless of influence or position) asking a company to review content against their own terms of service and policies.

The typical private citizen can click the “Report” button. They just can’t email a list of tweets to report directly to the review team. Apparently this private citizen could do that, as could the sitting president.

Do people here not believe that it’s normal for powerful, connected people to have “red phone” access to people high-up in corporations, media, etc? There are entire industries that exist to get you that access (if you don’t have it).

e.g. I believe Tim Cook could probably contact someone at Twitter and get an answer. Do we really believe he would go in the same queue as a “regular” citizen?

To me this is a shocking revelation to anyone who doesn’t actually understand how the world works. Which, to be fair, I didn’t either for a good while, and empathize.

I'm sure every top account had this access too. Dril probably has direct access to the mod team.

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