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And what do you think would have happened to Minneapolis or the Portland courthouse or the White House during the summer riots if there had not been a more competent security response? What happened at the Capitol was serious. So was what happened over the summer. But over the summer I heard nothing by "mostly peaceful protests" as literally billions of dollars of damage was caused and numerous deaths were racked up. Captiol protesters break some windows and I hear nothing but "violent rioting insurrectionists".

Back during the summer, Trump being secured in a shelter because of the riot security risk was LAUGHED at by the left. They accused him of being a coward for being taken to a bunker due to the risk of BLM protesters who burned a church across from the White House. Where's the same media laughing at the Congressional representatives fleeing from the people they're supposed to represent?

Look at the utterly insane mental gymnastics you're engaging in. "People are angry at constantly being treated with contempt and having their elected representative smeared. Let's impeach him again, call all his supporters terrorists, and ban them from communicating!" People like you and the Democrats seem desperate to cause more violence instead of de-escalating the situation with a peaceful, dignified exit. It's a shame that you care more about "owning Trump" one more time rather than promoting peace, but I'm not surprised.

I think it was a very concerning and unpredictable situation, but describing this group as "violent rioters" while describing the riots over the summer as "mostly peaceful protests" is farcical gaslighting. The potential consequences were more grave here, but the actual conduct itself seems much more orderly.

But I agree that as the Democrats and social media companies still continue to poke and poke and poke already angry people that the consequences can get worse. I wish someone reasonable would try to de-escalate the situation instead of continuing to add gasoline to the fire with further suppression, insults, and contempt for Trump and his supporters--but Silcion Vally and Democratic leadership can't seem to help themselves and would prefer to further insult and alienate the 74 million people who voted for Trump just 2 months ago.

Most stayed in velvet ropes and took selfies: https://youtu.be/y9WPuA6EUaw

You mean the violent attackers of democracy who stayed inside the velvet ropes and took selfies? https://youtu.be/y9WPuA6EUaw Seems like there is a comically biased double standard when describing protests and riots.

You keep pouring gasoline on a fire and then keep complaining that it won’t go out. You think impeaching him again and banning him on multiple platforms is going to de-escalate the situation? You know it will do the exact opposite. The Democrats and media companies want to poke and poke and poke until they provoke a reaction. You're delusional if you think you can keep insulting the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump without destabilizing the country. But your brains are so broken by Trump that you can't help yourselves and you're destroying the country because of it. I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, but I understand the rage Trump supporters are probably feeling. And I know who is primarily responsible: it's the same contemptuous out of touch elites that gave us Trump in the first place.

Did you actually read the Twitter blog post explaining the ban? They claim Trump Tweeting that he will not attend the Biden inauguration is “an incitement to violence”. That’s delusional.

> when the law in fact does the exact opposite

Yes. That’s exactly the problem people who want it repealed are pointing out: the current law offers broad blanket protection to social media companies to moderate content however they want, even if their moderation practices are highly editorial and partisan, akin to traditional publishers.

Techdirt seems to think people don’t understand that the law doesn’t distinguish between platforms and publishers. On the contrary, that’s precisely why people want it repealed or modified. Either attach platform “neutrality” requirements to these broad protections, or eliminate the protections and allow social media companies to be subject to the old legal regime attached to publishers.

This doesn’t seem that complicated to me. What’s all the I-am-smarter-than-you smugness about?

> Law text: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher.”

People who want Section 230 repealed or modified want to be able to make the legal argument that by actively banning certain speech while elevating other speech, social media companies ARE acting as publishers. The law doesn’t need to define publisher again. We already have an understanding of what publishers do: they selectively choose and publicize OTHER people’s content.

What am I missing? Whether or not it’s justified, the reason some people want it repealed seem obvious to me.

Yes. Attacked federal courthouses and a mob outside the White House burned a church.

I’m not even opposed to Biden, who is basically just a moderate Republican. But each day I get more and more outraged by the non-stop media smears and hysteria against Trump. I find my blood boiling at the hypocrisy—and I’m basically just a passive observer. For a real Trump supporter—of which there are tens of millions—I can only imagine the intensity of the hatred and anger that this speech suppression and new impeachment charade will cause. Instead of letting an old man go off to pasture and maybe start a little media company, they want to keep attacking and fanning the flames.

I give a lot of leeway to private companies, but there is something deeply concerning about Facebook and Twitter deciding what politicians are “acceptable”. Whether you like him or hate him, Donald Trump is a mainstream politician as evidenced by the tens of millions of votes he got.

And, there is a non-trvial chance he’d like to run for elected office again. But Twitter and Facebook and several companies seem to explicitly be saying, “no, we will not allow that.”

It’s not a power I want Jack Dorsey or Zuck to have.

It’s incredible that that’s the best you can do. And Joe Biden calling the election “a battle for the soul of America” is calling for war. Get real. 4 years of pearl clutching and you still can’t stop.

The fact that you don’t know which murders I’m taking about already speaks volumes about your myopic news bubble. Or maybe you do know which murders I’m talking about and you just want to continue playing a moving-the-goal post game. Tedious.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler: “I vehemently oppose what the Proud Boys and those associated with them stand for, and I will not tolerate hate speech and the damage it does in our city. White nationalists, particularly those coming to our city armed, threaten the safety of Portlanders and are not welcome here.”

The mayor calls a group of people demonstrating in his city hateful, “not welcome” and “threats to safety”. Not long after, a Patriot Prayer demonstrator Aaron Danielson was the victim of a pre-meditated murder by a man who described himself as “100% Antifa”. Joe Biden was asked on multiple occasions to condemn Antifa, and he refused, instead only generically condemned violence... exactly the same criticism leveled against Trump. I can cry and whine like you that Ted Wheeler and Joe Biden caused murder, but I’m not a baby. I’m not going to make speech illegal because I don’t like its content. Punish actual crimes, not speech you don’t like.

So, get out of your bubble and stop attacking freedom of expression, the most essential of freedoms.

Are you an inveterate liar or just that wildly uninformed? Democrats non-stop have called the 2016 election “stolen”, just like they called the 2000 election “stolen”. In 2019, Hillary Clinton called Trump an “illegitimate president” and accused him of stealing the election. Maybe try getting out of your echo chamber and you’d know these things.

Not to mention, do you know how many Democrats objected during the Congressional electoral college and certification session for Donald Trump? No, of course you don’t, because you’re spoonfed biased talking points and aren’t even interested in knowing the whole story. I bet you won’t even look it up because you don’t want to know the truth that Democratic congressional reps also tried to object to Trump’s presidential certification.

Instead, here you are trying use your childish sense of moral superiority to suppress freedom of expression. Maybe if you clutch your pearls even more strongly next time, I’ll feel the “shame” you think I should feel.

Democrats spent years calling the 2016 election illegitimate and fraudulent. I guess you considered that an incitement to violence too right? Oh wait, you didn’t? Weird, because that almost seems like blatant hypocrisy.

Yeah, what could go wrong with courts analyzing for subtext and divining intent of free speech to see if secret crimes were being committed? I continue to be stunned by how utterly naive and blasé people are about freedom of expression.

We both know the game you’re going to play. I’ll give you the name of the murdered man, the murderer aligned with Antifa, and a long list of times Joe Biden refused to condemn Antifa violence, and language from city mayors calling Trump-supporters unamerican, unwelcome, and threats to their city. I’ll say it clearly condoned violence and you’ll say it didn’t. And that’s exactly my point. You want to use a vague wishy-washy standard that you can use to suppress political opinions you disagree while letting political opinions you like slip by. Stop trying to censor speech. It’s 2021, not the dark ages. Grow up.

Got it. Protesting should be illegal. Thanks for the lesson on free speech.

What a news-bubble you live in. Multiple cities burned over the summer while many politicians, activist, and newspapers encouraged protests. Numerous Trump supporters were assaulted. At least two Trump supporters were shot to death.

The fact that you don’t know and don’t care about this shows in what politically-biased bad faith you’re operating.

And when politicians call each other Nazis, or when Joe Biden claimed that Mitt Romney wanted to re-enslave black people?

Seems like you're only going to apply your "inciting violence" claim to one side. I watched cities burn over the summer and intense levels of violence... And yet no one on the left trotted out speech bans and "incitement to violence" claims. It's obvious you're selectively targeting enforcement of intentionally vague standards. Federal buildings were being accosted in Portland and Seattle just a few months ago and the mayors supported them. Haven't seen their accounts banned.

Provide evidence please. Give me a example of where Trump called for violence

And what rules exactly did Trump break? He explicitly did not call for violence.

It seems like you want people silenced if they question the official narrative. That's precisely antithetical to free-speech ideals.

Do you know how often I've seen Republicans called Nazis? Or evil? Or that they need to be eliminated? I don't go crying to Facebook to censor opinions I don't like.

Sure, but universities are old and stodgy. Maybe it’s people who want to be professors in the first place that should be changed. With hindsight, moving to BioNTech seems like the best decision she could have made, and now she can enjoy the final laugh.

Exactly. Her moving to BioNTech seems to have been the best outcome possible... even though I completely understand her sourness at Penn. But it sounds like she’ll get the last laugh and can call out Penn for its lack of vision.

The Penn president is an inauthentic talking head whose primary qualification for the job is being able to schmooze with Joe Biden and Comcast executives.

I'm as libertarian as they come, but I've also lived in Baltimore and know how incapable the city is of controlling its crime. Baltimore's homicide clearance rate in 2019 was 32%. Not only does that leave its residents living in fear, that also represents an outrageous injustice against victims whose deaths are written off as business as usual.

Baltimore residents have a right to set their own destiny, but if they reject innovations in crime control that at least have a chance of being effective, I'm sure they'll spend the next 30 years like the last 30: getting absolutely nowhere. I spent decades desperately hoping and expecting Baltimore to turn the corner. It's an absolutely beautiful city with a rich history and many world-class cultural and educational institutions. But it hasn't changed (except even more murders over the last 50 years) and won't ever change if it doesn't control its crime.

Frankly, the city already has many hundreds of street-level "blue light" cameras all over the place. To me, those are far more problematic and intrusive with respect to privacy than aerial surveillance. I'd much rather be an anonymous pixel on a giant map than a person whose recognizable features are video recorded and stored on a government street level security camera. To me, blue light cameras are both more problematic and fundamentally less effective. And yet, that's what the city has already accepted as a worthwhile privacy trade off.

This could be a great example of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" described by Michael Crichton. Anyone who works in American healthcare instantly knows the premise of this article is wholly absurd. Whether or not it's strictly the best policy, HIPAA is non-negotiable and has been so for decades. And, for infection control, most COVID units didn't even let family members in. Imagine how furious you'd be if a hospital told you a loved one couldn't visit but some non-medical rando who wanted to photograph everybody could.

Michael Crichton's point with describing "Gell-Mann Amnesia" is that when you see a news article on a topic you're knowledgeable about, you quickly recognize that it's completely wrong in almost all key aspects. Sometimes they even get things precisely backward. But when you turn the page and start reading about something you're not an expert in--say foreign policy--you strangely forget how shoddy the journalism was just moments ago, and assume that this next article about something you’re not knowledgeable about is probably roughly accurate.

Of course if you have committed an actual crime you should be prosecuted. For example, those Volkswagen people who effectively used fraud to fake emissions data committed an actual crime. On the other hand, selling a LEGAL product which millions or billions of people find useful even if it may have some downstream consequences is not a crime at all. And the examples you used of poisoning were sugar and trans fats. That’s hysterical nonsense.

I agree that private entities can largely can do whatever they feel like. But there is something deeply obnoxious and unprincipled when these entities piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining. They’re actively suppressing non-establishment viewpoints while pretending to be a non-editorial, neutral platform. And, perhaps most insidiously, because of their secret suppression of ideas and voices, they make it seem as if certain mainstream viewpoints are actually unacceptable fringe ideas. Suppose I ran a forum used to discuss crimes in my city, but secretly hid anyone’s post unless the crime they were discussing had an Asian or Arab person as a suspect? And then, suppose I also secretly deleted any comments from people complaining about the secret editing. That’s not the style of forum people should be defending. It’s legally permissible but all types of dystopian.

How do you not get that this is the exact point? “Experts” in the US government and the “intelligence agencies” declared forcefully that it was true. You—-not an “expert” and not a member of “authoritative” US intelligence agency—-claiming that it was just “propagandistic patriotic fervor” would be “misinformation” stated “without evidence”. Stopping people from questioning the narrative is fundamentally against free speech and having a small group of people presume to be the final arbiters of truth with the power to suppress contrary speech is dystopian to the max. You want free speech when you agree with it and suppression when you disagree with it. That’s deeply unprincipled.