I didn't see the latest one, but the one before that was a video of Trump telling supports to go home, but then also continuing the allegations that the election was stolen. It initially appeared with a fact-checker disclaimer* that the allegations where wrong. I guess they weighted hims saying "go home" against the continued factually incorrect claims, which are now throwing fire on the flame, even if he's saying go home.
* Disclaimer was: "This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can't be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence"
Off topic, but I would welcome a feature on HN where people could at least (perhaps anonymously) provide feedback or a canned response or something when they downvote.
Same; I value constructive criticism and don't mind people telling me I might be in the wrong. It's not the fact that I'm getting downvoted that perturbs me, it's that I might not realize what's wrong about my statement if someone doesn't speak up.
> These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!
(By searching portions you should be able to confirm that this is accurate -- please let me know if I mistyped.
Well, yeah that's kind of my point. The best way for the president to directly reach people is through these tech companies. That's how powerful they've become. What's the alternative for direct communication?
The alternative is whitehouse.gov or maga.gov or whatever. Does Trump use Twitter/Facebook because they are powerful or are they powerful because Trump uses them?
It's ridiculous that people are actually trying to argue that the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth has no effective way to communicate with the public outside of Twitter.
Plenty of presidents before him have functioned just fine without Twitter, I'm not sure why people are outraged about a single channel of communication, among a sea of countless others, not being available to him is a problem.
And in addition to those three, he still has plenty of other avenues with which to communicate. Again; email, text, Parler, WH.gov, his own personal website, press conferences, TV stations, so on and so forth.
Obama is just one president in a sea of 45 presidents over the course of 231 years. They all managed just fine without tech companies, and Trump will manage to find a way.
Information needs to move fast today. It was the norm for news to travel slowly in the past. Today the president needs to be able to speak quickly to people.
Besides whitehouse.gov, which he should've been using, he has no other way to quickly, directly communicate to any constituent that wants to see his message.
Nothing stopping him starting his own blog. He could probably appoint a Secretary of Important Presidential Lying and everything, make it nice and official.
What's scary is that the Cabinet and Congress are standing back and breaking their oath to defend the US Constitution, allowing the President to lead a coup against the United States.
Wait, the left forcibly occupied the Capitol at the behest of the defeated candidate with the overt goal of using threat of violence to get the election results disregarded?
With all the riots that have happened in 2020, it feels they struck while the world was weak in order to hold countries to ransom. Whether that was the goal or not isn't that important, but it has certainly had the effect of making countries around the world spend more money on policing when they could have spent that money more effectively controlling the pandemic.
maybe if the left were willing to actually challenge power instead of sacking churches and burning down wendy's in poor neighborhoods we'd have a credible path to healthcare by now.
the lesson of 2020 & the omnibus are that if politicians are not scared they will ignore you.
It's incredible how easy it is for you to wear reality-bending goggles and throw generalities like "No one complained when there were fires and property damage during BLM protests", and that what happened today was "peaceful".
You can grasp the next "fact": that the Trumpites were peaceful, this was an Antifa false flag operation (you can find doctored evidence of this on Twitter). If you can lie to yourself about that, then you can go to sleep at night feeling that you're the moral one, that you're the one still on the correct side of humanity...
For what its worth, I think all of them were in the wrong. Whether you're armed with Molotov cocktails or conventional firearms, you're armed and a threat. The blm/antifa riots were just as much riots as what happened today. Everyone involved in those events that did not disperse when things got violent should be treated as a criminal, regardless of who's "side" they are on.
In this case, he has chosen to become semi-dependent upon an independent organization.
He is the President of the most powerful country in the world. He could call a news conference and make himself available to the people. Those who wish to hear what he has to say can come, listen, and cover his story.
Furthermore, whitehouse.gov is accessible to everyone. RSS is a thing.
What a good idea, let's all have Big Media that doesn't have to provide a source for the information in their publications /s
We live in the information age, why is it so hard for a newspaper to add "example.com/news/1234/sources" to the bottom of the article to give us a nice little Harvard format list of references to all the claims they make?
How so? Let's take it to the extreme, suppose he called on his followers to murder group XYZ. Should Twitter allow that? If the answer is no, then it's not 'scary' at all that such a message could be censored.
If you're saying that this particular message shouldn't have been cancelled, different discussion.
But you literally have a mob which stormed and broke into the capitol of the US, with armed guns, and explosives being found, all of which directly linked to the president lying for weeks, instigating things and calling on his followers to rise up, now obviously resulting in risk of violence and at least one person getting shot in the neck. The notion that such lies should continue to be freely posted on a platform that has basic rules in place just because it's the president, is insane. If the president is insane and it's causing violence, you can't just sit back. (insert obligatory WWII/Hitler reference if you will)
Lastly, he has plenty of communication channels. What's scary is if a private company like Twitter or any other news outlet got forced to publish whatever the current person in power wanted to say on their platform.
If he called on people to murder another group, I would want to know that. What if I'm in the group to be murdered?
I wanted to see what he said that was so bad it had to be removed. But I couldn't, and I didn't know where else to look. So I'm left in the dark. I had the know-how to go to Parlor, but not everyone does. It just seems unfair that tech companies get to decide if the average Joe gets to see a message from the President or not. Trump should have normalized posting his messages on whitehouse.gov or something to avoid this.
> It's scary that three tech companies can censor a president like this.
Somebody must to do the job, and republican party was clearly useless for that.
Not censoring him before has lead to this insanity, a woman killed today and thousands of really misguided people that will end in jail. Fortunately they were white and the police got confused whereas deciding between friend or foe; I don't think that the outcome would have been so restrained in case of a majority of black people trying to assault the capitol.
This is no more a removal of free speech than a demand to print someone's opinion on the front page of NYT. Twitter is a private platform. Feel free to use any other platform.
> Private companies are under no obligation to protect your right to free speech.
More to the point, your right to free speech isn’t a constraint on the private companies right to exercise theirs.
And even more to the point, @realDonaldTrump is (and has been described as such by its owner in court cases) a official communication tool of the Office of the President; it trumping the preferences of private media firm by whose resources it is relayed would be a direct, government violation of the right of free speech/press.
Unless you mean you're disappointed that the president has said something so egregious they've been forced to censor him, I really have no idea where you're coming from. He's inciting an armed mob to storm the seat of the US government. Where would you draw the line?
i believe at least one the tweets they deleted were calls for people to calm down and leave, that seems like the opposite of incitement.
>Where would you draw the line?
no line. representatives have chosen not to represent their constituents, at a certain point it needs to be clear that if you can't keep your promises, ignore the needs and concerns of the public while holding them in contempt, this is the only possible outcome. censorship cannot solve this problem, only effective governance can.
it wouldn't be free speech if there were.
the first amendment was written by a group of seditious traitors who rebelled against the state. speech is not a tool for preserving the state, it exists to protect the people.
We have a more fundamental disagreement than tweets in that case. If anyone should be allowed to post anything, what about images of child pornography?
do you arrest a bank robber for double parking?
there is a fundamental difference in my eyes between prosecuting speech and prosecuting damage. people lie incessantly every single day, not all of those lies are criminally libelous, but when they are, the issue at hand is the resulting material damage. with child pornography this is even more straightforward. the creation of cp is inherently damaging it is also both the evidence and admission of a crime as would be the conspiracy to finance and distribute said material.
the problem with prosecuting the speech itself w/ cp is that there is simply too great of a grey area when it comes to material and intent and too little actual demonstrable benefit to society at large. as a rule, i tend to believe 'i know it when i see it' is among the worst possible legal arguments to be given institutional credence.
With respect, it feels to me like you're sidestepping the issue because it's more satisfying if the law has clean lines. What about incitement to murder? If Trump said something like "I think people should take their assault wepaons to Washington DC and kill Joe Biden." Incitement to murder in this case is speech, but it's criminal speech, ergo speech cannot be entirely free. Effectively what I'm saying is that I don't think it's possible to be as cut-and-dry as you'd like it to be.
>forced to censor him
Really!? Who was holding the gun to their head.
It was probably advisable to censor his tweets if Twitter didn't want their more easily angered users to turn against them, but they were by no means compelled to do anything.
We differ on semantics. I didn't mean they were forced to by anyone outside Twitter, more that a threshold has been crossed here which they really couldn't ignore or sidestep by placing an "advisory notice" next to a tweet.
I understand that you intend that to read as "do you think people should be allowed to yell 'fire!' in a crowded room in which there is no fire", but for every false positive punished you create a chance for a false negative to arise from people to afraid to speak up for fear of getting it wrong.
My evidence is mainly from an infosec perspective: you aren't going to get your front desk to report suspicious activity if they have no incentive, or if they feel like they are fobbed off every time they try to report a potential issue. Every report of a problem, no matter how big or small, should at least be taken seriously enough to record the report and investigate its credibility - otherwise you'll set up a culture of issues going unreported because they get poo-pooed when they are reported. I'll see if I can find the talk where this concept was first put in such plain words to me, but I believe it was a Defcon talk called "Steal Everything, Kill Everyone, Cause Total Financial Ruin".
> As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy.
> This means that the account of @realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours following the removal of these Tweets. If the Tweets are not removed, the account will remain locked.
So I bet they remove similar tweets by pols around other civil disobedience demos, right?
I think any neutral party will see a narrative that’s being set and an opposite narrative that’s being disallowed.
I cannot predict what the Biden admin will do, but it behooves the Biden admin to not let these outlets determine what narratives are allowed and which ones aren’t.
Biden is an old style liberal, if he ignores these orgs and let’s them set agendas, it’ll come to bite him (ala Red Guards vs PLA -I bet he’s old enough to recall that)
For the next 2 weeks it is important to remove Trump's ability to incite and mobilize his supporters. There won't be a peaceful transfer of power otherwise. One person has already died.
Was she lawfully there? She was climbing through a hole in a door where she and her fellow agressors just smashed a glass pane. Did she have a bomb in her backpack? (Probably not, but hey, others have been killed for less...)
Source for this? I have looked at the videos and read multiple articles and can’t find anything saying or showing what happened prior to her being shot, or even showing who shot her.
I saw the video before it was deleted. She went up into the broken window to cross through to the other side where the police were holding their position and was immediately shot. It was chaos in that hallway.
I wonder if there’s a concept similar to “felony murder” in a case like this? (If you rob a bank and a security guard shoots a bystander, you get charged with murder.)
...is what they would say if she were black. Instead, she was white, and was seditiously tresspasing on secure, federal property as part of an insurrection riot.
Silicon Valley and the media created the Donald Trump presidency. The one bright side of today's nightmare is that the case for antitrust against the Big Tech companies is as clear as day. These conglomerates purposely designed toxic algorithms that created violence and chaos in the name of endless growth. Millions of minds were poisoned with conspiracies, hate, and lies.
Break Twitter, Facebook, and Google up. NEVER AGAIN!
This is not going to end well... The left will use this as evidence that they can and should control speech because Trump was saying things that are very wrong. The right will use this as evidence that Twitter/etc are political speech organizations and definitely not common carriers and thus require either being broken up or laws put in place requiring they treat all content equally.
It's incredible that people here are celebrating tech companies censoring the president.
You'd have to be extremely shortsighted or naive to think this is a good thing.
Every day, many here are screaming zuckerburg is evil, twitter is horrible, break up tech companies. And yet the same people are celebrating these tech companies censoring a government official.
Good god, people like you are the real problem. I'd bet you cry and whine if you were banned. Also if you are right then we are fucked since 70+ million people voted for the "terrorist".
But of course you don't really believe it. Just spewing hyper partisan bullshit.
Also, in his censored tweets, he was asking his supporters to go home peacefully. So more like defusing the situation rather than igniting it.
But regardless, you'd have to be an idiot to support a bunch of unelected tech elites censoring elected government officials. Whether it is democrat or republican or independent, sane people would say it's not for the tech elites to decide which politician gets to say what.
For all the talk about "democracy", those purporting to support it sure love censorship and authoritarianism.
> we are fucked since 70+ million people voted for the ...
Are you only now realizing we're fucked? We have the most Corona virus death rates of any country in the world, our stature in the world has never been lower, China is making deals with EU [1] and Asia, leaving out the US, Russia is hacking us with impunity and offering bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan, ... I could go on and and on. We were fucked 4 years ago when we elected a president whose solve qualification is that he is a white supremacist. It will take us many years to unfuck ourselves.
Terrorist that won 80 million votes, and from where I stand, plausible stolen elections. But hey, as long as Twitter and FB do what you like it’s fine?
115 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] thread"This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence"
But they must have realised that admitting the posts are likely to stoke violence while not removing them was a bad look
* Disclaimer was: "This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can't be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence"
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for this. Here is a screenshot of the removed tweet: https://d.pr/i/Ex15UI/ABdSwruLJz
Edit: If you're going to downvote me, I welcome an open conversation about why I might be wrong.
> These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!
(By searching portions you should be able to confirm that this is accurate -- please let me know if I mistyped.
This is the link; it's probably cached somewhere, too https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469549709107077...)
It's ridiculous that people are actually trying to argue that the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth has no effective way to communicate with the public outside of Twitter.
Obama is just one president in a sea of 45 presidents over the course of 231 years. They all managed just fine without tech companies, and Trump will manage to find a way.
Besides whitehouse.gov, which he should've been using, he has no other way to quickly, directly communicate to any constituent that wants to see his message.
Oh wait...
When the left does it, even if they're hyper violent, it's called a peaceful protest. When the right does it, it's a coup and insurrection.
Yeah right.
Wait, the left forcibly occupied the Capitol at the behest of the defeated candidate with the overt goal of using threat of violence to get the election results disregarded?
When?
You can grasp the next "fact": that the Trumpites were peaceful, this was an Antifa false flag operation (you can find doctored evidence of this on Twitter). If you can lie to yourself about that, then you can go to sleep at night feeling that you're the moral one, that you're the one still on the correct side of humanity...
He is the President of the most powerful country in the world. He could call a news conference and make himself available to the people. Those who wish to hear what he has to say can come, listen, and cover his story.
Furthermore, whitehouse.gov is accessible to everyone. RSS is a thing.
We live in the information age, why is it so hard for a newspaper to add "example.com/news/1234/sources" to the bottom of the article to give us a nice little Harvard format list of references to all the claims they make?
If you're saying that this particular message shouldn't have been cancelled, different discussion.
But you literally have a mob which stormed and broke into the capitol of the US, with armed guns, and explosives being found, all of which directly linked to the president lying for weeks, instigating things and calling on his followers to rise up, now obviously resulting in risk of violence and at least one person getting shot in the neck. The notion that such lies should continue to be freely posted on a platform that has basic rules in place just because it's the president, is insane. If the president is insane and it's causing violence, you can't just sit back. (insert obligatory WWII/Hitler reference if you will)
Lastly, he has plenty of communication channels. What's scary is if a private company like Twitter or any other news outlet got forced to publish whatever the current person in power wanted to say on their platform.
I wanted to see what he said that was so bad it had to be removed. But I couldn't, and I didn't know where else to look. So I'm left in the dark. I had the know-how to go to Parlor, but not everyone does. It just seems unfair that tech companies get to decide if the average Joe gets to see a message from the President or not. Trump should have normalized posting his messages on whitehouse.gov or something to avoid this.
Somebody must to do the job, and republican party was clearly useless for that.
Not censoring him before has lead to this insanity, a woman killed today and thousands of really misguided people that will end in jail. Fortunately they were white and the police got confused whereas deciding between friend or foe; I don't think that the outcome would have been so restrained in case of a majority of black people trying to assault the capitol.
More to the point, your right to free speech isn’t a constraint on the private companies right to exercise theirs.
And even more to the point, @realDonaldTrump is (and has been described as such by its owner in court cases) a official communication tool of the Office of the President; it trumping the preferences of private media firm by whose resources it is relayed would be a direct, government violation of the right of free speech/press.
>Where would you draw the line?
no line. representatives have chosen not to represent their constituents, at a certain point it needs to be clear that if you can't keep your promises, ignore the needs and concerns of the public while holding them in contempt, this is the only possible outcome. censorship cannot solve this problem, only effective governance can.
It was probably advisable to censor his tweets if Twitter didn't want their more easily angered users to turn against them, but they were by no means compelled to do anything.
I understand that you intend that to read as "do you think people should be allowed to yell 'fire!' in a crowded room in which there is no fire", but for every false positive punished you create a chance for a false negative to arise from people to afraid to speak up for fear of getting it wrong.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
> As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy.
> This means that the account of @realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours following the removal of these Tweets. If the Tweets are not removed, the account will remain locked.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1346970430062485505
I think any neutral party will see a narrative that’s being set and an opposite narrative that’s being disallowed.
I cannot predict what the Biden admin will do, but it behooves the Biden admin to not let these outlets determine what narratives are allowed and which ones aren’t.
Biden is an old style liberal, if he ignores these orgs and let’s them set agendas, it’ll come to bite him (ala Red Guards vs PLA -I bet he’s old enough to recall that)
Source for this? I have looked at the videos and read multiple articles and can’t find anything saying or showing what happened prior to her being shot, or even showing who shot her.
This bot downloaded the video: https://twitter.com/this_vid/status/1346973985737732097 (2nd video in the URL mentioned in that tweet).
Edit: OK, what she was doing before she climbed through: https://twitter.com/SP_Longie/status/1346952013532184576
I hope Trump is held responsible for the death his actions resulted in.
...is what they would say if she were black. Instead, she was white, and was seditiously tresspasing on secure, federal property as part of an insurrection riot.
Break Twitter, Facebook, and Google up. NEVER AGAIN!
At worst, he’s fomenting violent revolution.
Basically Twitter for people who believe in democratic institutions and Parler for others. Here Trump clearly posted a Parler message on Twitter.
This is a pandora's box.
You'd have to be extremely shortsighted or naive to think this is a good thing.
Every day, many here are screaming zuckerburg is evil, twitter is horrible, break up tech companies. And yet the same people are celebrating these tech companies censoring a government official.
But of course you don't really believe it. Just spewing hyper partisan bullshit.
Also, in his censored tweets, he was asking his supporters to go home peacefully. So more like defusing the situation rather than igniting it.
But regardless, you'd have to be an idiot to support a bunch of unelected tech elites censoring elected government officials. Whether it is democrat or republican or independent, sane people would say it's not for the tech elites to decide which politician gets to say what.
For all the talk about "democracy", those purporting to support it sure love censorship and authoritarianism.
Are you only now realizing we're fucked? We have the most Corona virus death rates of any country in the world, our stature in the world has never been lower, China is making deals with EU [1] and Asia, leaving out the US, Russia is hacking us with impunity and offering bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan, ... I could go on and and on. We were fucked 4 years ago when we elected a president whose solve qualification is that he is a white supremacist. It will take us many years to unfuck ourselves.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/business/china-eu-investm...