Edit: nobody has an answer? It seems a very important question. Like if you say “spreading fake news”, you are saying Twitter should act as an authority of truth. Since they can’t possibly be that, where does that leave us?
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
It is a fact that that this election is over, and Biden won fair and square. 60 losses in State and Federal courts proves that. And yet Trump continues to incite his supporters by spreading falsehoods - the election was stolen, the other side committed fraud, patriots need to #stopthesteal and so on. Even yesterday he promised never to concede.
But sure, selectively look at the text where says “remain peaceful”. What a joke people like you are.
a supporter misspelled the word “cavalry” in tweeting that “The calvary is coming, Mr. President!”
Mr. Trump responded: “A great honor!”
------
But first came the remarks of the President, delivered on the Ellipse, just south of the White House.
“We will never give up,” he said. “We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s death involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”
You’ll notice that tweet was _not_ taken down, but tweets that told the protestors they were special people and something needed to be done about the stolen election were taken down.
Twitter is a company providing free service, and they have the right to prevent anyone from using it at their discretion without any explanation whatsoever. Twitter can explain their position but it can be completely wrong, and an explanation definitely does not make them any authority of any kind, and doesn't mean anything about other cases.
You're not legitimately looking for an answer, therefore few are going to spend the time on it. Your questions are answered by honest research and taking the time to argue against yourself before doing it to other people.
Doesn’t Section 230 actually protect them? Without it, they’d have no “safe harbor” protections against his account and would be forced to proactively remove stuff and would overmoderate to avoid lawsuits.
I think it is more that they see selectively removing content as equivalent to moderation and thus they shouldn't have safe harbor. So maybe they want them to only remove illegal content or something?
As OniBait says, I think (I've given up trying to figure out the details of what they're doing) they are using the threat of removing 230 as a stick to stop social media companies from any moderation at all. Withou 230, the user-generated-content business model is untenable.
Really? He would seem to be the king of all whales. His extremes draw people to the platform. No doubt countless seniors only ever installed the app so that they could follow trump. Like it or not, he draws in new users.
How about legal exposure, or loss of political goodwill (especially by those who are in positions to provide oversight)? Profitability is impacted by more factors than just raw "number of eyeballs"
In 2017 I saw Twitter advertising in Tokyo’s metro with Trump tweets. Even if their PR said “we don’t like it but it’s in the public interest,” it was obviously in their interest. Twitter has been mentioned daily in the news for the past 5 years, they turned a huge profit thanks the guy.
The only reason they’re acting now is that their excuse is about to expire. If they found another good excuse, Trump would stay.
Back then, it was in everyones interesst. Trump caused controversy, that drove traffic. Same applied for mainstream media and TV, everyone covered im because he drove engangement. The world would be much different, if everybody would just not have covered him and his rallies already in 2016. Everybody did, so.
Covering doesn’t mean letting him speak directly to the public. CNN also let him speak live after the election, but when he started speaking nonsense they interrupted the feed.
What’s happening this week isn’t new, it’s been happening for years.
The election doesn’t delete Trump’s Twitter followers. If anything, twitter’s actions show this was never about profit... but about the fact that no media outlet in the US has ever outright censored a sitting president.
He absolutely is. Trump is the only reason I actually go to twitter at all. The rest of the website is effectively a trash dump. Also if you haven't figured it out. Trump is likely to radically reform the entire republican party. Just because he lost the election doesn't mean he is going out of politics.
Recent events have forced Republican politicians to choose sides clearly rather than sitting on the fence hoping he will go away. This will hopefully severely limit Trumps power in the Republican party in the future.
He will probably not leave politics entirely, though. That would mean being forced to admit that he lost which is beyond his ego.
half the country hangs on trump's every word. to look at it from the other side, consider two Democrats running for office. one gets Obama's endorsement the other gets tarred and feathered. which one stands a better chance to win?
Every single comment on HN is political to varying degrees. The ones decrying politics are, ironically, among the most political; they specifically seek to perpetuate the status quo.
And at the outset, they changed the rules specifically to make his violations not violations (with an exception for leaders motivated by the constant complaints about his incessant violations); it was only toward the end that they restored the idea that there were rules that could apply to Trump (though they were still weaker than the generally applicable rules.)
I think that made sense to be honest; like it or not, Trump is the elected president, and denying the democratically elected president of your country access to your platform is quite the step. I mean, I sure don't like the entire situation as such, but in the same position, I probably would have done something similar.
> This is the case in more or less any similar country.
reply
That’s true in the sense that Twitter’s rules change specifically motivated by Trump’s violation of their pre-existing rules applied globally, not just in the US, and enabled and was seized on by similarly-oriented leaders elsewhere, as well.
It's not just about Twitter; in my own country the courts gave our own Trumpian firebrand Geert Wilders more leeway on account of being a democratically elected MP in two separate rulings. Actually, many countries have presidential and/or parliamentary immunity laws, partly so they can say what they think without fear of prosecution. Twitter is just following this long-standing precedent.
> Actually, many countries have presidential and/or parliamentary immunity laws, partly so they can say what they think without fear of prosecution.
Those laws are a mistake, because sooner or later, you elect a man who revels in being above the law, and who will act accordingly. Yesterday, such a man started a coup, in order to retain power. A few days before that, he was committing election fraud in Georgia. These are serious crimes, the consequences of which he is shielded from.
It's just a modern version of the divine right of kings.
So I can file charges against MPs if I believe that "taxation is theft"? Or the next government can if they don't like my tax laws? Or charge MPs for libel or slander for saying their opinion about something? What if homosexuality is illegal and I say it should be legal, can I be charged then?
These laws exist for a reason. And just because Trump is Trump doesn't mean it doesn't work well most of the time. Remember this is the same man chanting "lock her up" and promised to change libel laws so he could sue everyone and their mother. Do you think he wouldn't have gone after elected officials with lawsuits?
And for most countries these laws are very far from absolute, and/or come with escape hatches.
> So I can file charges against MPs if I believe that "taxation is theft"?
If you are a DA, yes. Private citizens can't file criminal charges. A judge would throw your case out, and you'd probably be disbarred, though. Those are the checks and balances inside our legal system.
If you can't see the difference between POTUS committing a clearly defined crime (Say, election fraud... Or sedition.) and the legal 'theories' of the sovereign citizen movement, I don't know what to say.
> Or charge MPs for libel or slander for saying their opinion about something?
1. You can already do that. Libel and slander are civil cases, and you can sue anyone you want in civil court, for any reason whatsoever, including POTUS.
2. If the courts find it to actually be libel or slander, why the hell not? If an elected official knowingly spreads lies and falsehoods that cause you material harm, you should be entitled to restitution.
> These laws exist for a reason.
Yes, elected officials passed them to protect themselves from legal consequences for their actions.
> And just because Trump is Trump doesn't mean it doesn't work well most of the time.
No, it doesn't work well most of the time. There's a very clear lack of equality under the law in this country - with the executive, its minions, and its friends being very clearly above the law.
> Remember this is the same man chanting "lock her up" and promised to change libel laws so he could sue everyone and their mother.
So, hold on, let's break this down.
We currently have laws that protect the executive from criminal prosecution.
This protection, at the moment, only applies to the current executive, not someone who might become part of the executive in the future.
And you are concerned that weakening these laws will let the current executive attack their future opposition.
... That doesn't make a lick of sense. Prior to getting elected, Trump had no power to 'lock her up'. After Trump got elected, Hillary was no longer protected, because she was not part of the executive.
How exactly is making the sitting president immune to criminal prosecution protect their political opponents from his vindictive behaviour? If anything, it empowers his vindictive behaviour. He is using these laws to protect himself, as he attack his opposition, and prevents a peaceful transfer of power.
And yes, I'm aware that impeachment exists. The impeachment process is a kangaroo court, the impartiality of which would make a Soviet judge blush.
All I'm saying that in general these laws are common, exist in many countries, exist for good reasons, and that Twitter is acting according to their precedent. Are there downsides and is it a trade-off? Sure, most things are.
I'm not really interested about a conversation about various details; especially not if your response is just a flat unnuanced "elected officials passed them to protect themselves from legal consequences". I'm not even talking about the US specifically. The world is larger than the US, and the US doesn't even have MPs. I don't even know the specifics of the US laws on this.
It would draw some criticisms, but Twitter would be banning his personal account, the one he used before becoming president and will probably use afterwards, providing it isn't banned.
The official Twitter account of the POTUS is @POTUS, not @realdonaldtrump.
It's a bit of a fine line though; and wouldn't Trump just start tweeting at the @POTUS account? In fact, if I check it, it already looks just like @realdonaldtrump accounts since it's just retweets from there.
Not sure if you're genuinely asking because you don't know, but the reason is because they have a policy for this (1). Personally, I find it both compelling and reassuring.
They have a public policy written down somewhere, but I'd wager the reasoning is more "we're not going to antagonize individuals who have a direct impact on our bottom line through legislation/prosecution." He lost that card.
This would be the most dangerous time to do it, funnel all his followers on to a hyper radicalized platform like Gab or Parler right after insurrectionists have literally stormed the Capitol and couldn't be stopped even after police shot one of them.
The smart move is to bide their time slowly backing him down without angering him until January 20th when he no longer has any power to use any lever of power.
A furious Trump issuing a blanket pardon to anyone on Parler after being kicked off twitter could be a real result.
IANAL, but I somehow doubt that's how pardons work.
EDIT: What I specifically doubt is that Trump can just write out a pardon for "anyone on Parler". Doesn't it have to be a pardon for someone specific? Or can it be as generic and vague as he wants?
Thanks, I should've been more explicit about what I was doubting. I'll go edit my comment so I don't have to repeat the explanation to everyone who decides to reply :)
On January 21, 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter grants an unconditional pardon to hundreds of thousands of men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War.
In total, some 100,000 young Americans went abroad in the late 1960s and early 70s to avoid serving in the war. Ninety percent went to Canada, where after some initial controversy they were eventually welcomed as immigrants. Still others hid inside the United States. In addition to those who avoided the draft, a relatively small number–about 1,000–of deserters from the U.S. armed forces also headed to Canada. While the Canadian government technically reserved the right to prosecute deserters, in practice they left them alone, even instructing border guards not to ask too many questions.
That's a specific crime though. If Trump says "I pardon all Parler users for all crimes", can Parler start selling its accounts as a "get out of federal crimes free" card?
Pardons can not apply to future crimes, only crimes already committed and only to those specified at the time of pardon. Someone joining after would need to be pardoned again
Look, the guy just wants Poland, so I say we just give it to him. He calms down a bit and we avoid a nasty war. Everybody wins! (Well, except maybe the Poles, I guess.)
Conventionally, at least in Britain, you just say "Peace in our time" (or more correctly "Peace for our time") to invoke this idea. That's what Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said after he landed in Britain with signed agreement from Hitler that there would be no war.
But I suppose that might be unfamiliar to American readers as they did not enter the war at the beginning, and "Peace for our time" was invoked in a different context by JFK.
I think this isn't really about his hard-core follower base; those people are kind of lost already, for the moment at least, but rather for the more moderate followers/supporter base, who won't follow him to Gab or whatnot.
Because he still has the power and influence to bring up questions over whether or not Twitter is a publisher. Censorship/ostracision is only useful for people that can't fight back. Just like a lot of Trumps deals/leases/accounts will likely be terminated the second Biden is sworn in.
Well, perma-banning the president is going to stir yet another round of controversy. Since he's going in two weeks, it seems safer to just wait two weeks and perma-ban the ex president of the United States. (Assuming he and his supporters don't try to take it up another notch in the meantime.)
He still does and always had access to it, but true to character, he wanted to build his own brand and follower base rather than that of the POTUS account which will be closed and archived once he is dethroned.
I must apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings whether or not they had something more appropriate to contribute.
I should have put a question mark at the end of my message.
Never was good at grammar to begin with.
I don't know if it's the Democrats or Republicans who are less trustworthy from one day to the next.
Wouldn't want to buy a used car from any one of 'em. Even worse a new car.
Anyway, if Hillary Clinton did something treasonous enough to get locked up it would have happened.
For how long who knows, but what would be equal protection under the law for US citizens to be protected from those who would threaten the sanctity of the US Democracy, especially from a position of power when that position is intended to preseve the work of all those who have come before and served without any doubt of their good intentions for all constituents?
I'm curious if this will be possible 10 years from now. A single corporation to be able to censor a president. No matter who that president is or what is she/he saying. What if that corporation is led by someone else with totally different political views or motivation?
On one platform. He still can pull up a press conference whenever he wants just like every other president has done when they need to communicate with the public
And that's precisely the danger of social media. If he must reach his following through a (relatively) neutral third party (the main-stream media) that third party can choose whether or not to pass that information on.
If he always and at all times has unfettered access to a rabid following, there is no moderation, no mediation, and we get our current situation.
> He still can pull up a press conference whenever he wants just like every other president has done when they need to communicate with the public
The media has regularly ignored presidential press conferences they didn't care about for decades now. Bush, Obama, and Trump all had many press conferences that received minimal coverage. In that light, it's no surprise that a President would seek our a more direct line of communication.
> single corporation to be able to censor a president
People on a medium tend to overstate that media’s influence. Newspapers routinely refuse to print politicians’ op eds. Twitter is more pervasive, but it’s far from universal. As long as it’s not fiddled with around elections, de-platforming is fine.
The President does have certain abilities to commandeer media time, but that would require making an official address.
God damn, I'd have this discussion any other day but not today.
The President is inciting violence by spreading dangerous misinformation and not condemning domestic terrorists.
Our sacred democratic institutions and world standing have taken a big hit. And, even worse - American lives were lost today due to this rhetoric.
We can't continue acting like this is a matter of hurr durr censorship anymore. It's time to move past idealism and into reality: people are in danger. Words have consequences.
We saw today what happens when people with immense power spout extremist ideology for years without consequence.
Let today's action by Twitter be part of the consequence. It's not censorship: it's consequence. Trump will not be arrested or chased for his rhetoric. He simply won't be able to spout it to the masses on a privately owned platform.
A life was lost today. There should be some consequence.
It is curious to me that the reaction to people rioting in a place of institutional, systemic power is much more negative than when people were rioting and damaging small businesses, homes, and killing regular people. That is, people seem to be reacting much more strongly to people rioting in a way that damages institutional power than when they were rioting in a way that damaged the powerless.
You make it sound like Twitter is the be all and end all of public discourse. Twitter isn't even in the top five. He could ramble on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit or Snapchat before we even get down to Twitter.
Exactly. Censorship is done by the government. A private entity can not "censor" anyone, legally. And the idea that the President of the United States is deprived of a platform by this is ludicrous.
> censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
Nothing here says it's only censorship if done by the government. Legally in the USA there's a stark distinction between government & non-governmental censorship. Even then sometimes private entities fall under restrictions like in the case of the FCC & public broadcast networks (see Janet Jackson nip slip, the inability to curse during certain TV/radio programs at certain times, etc). Now whether all of this desirable or not is politically debatable & one we should have. That being said under the current legal structure Twitter is probably in the clear.
I'm generally more curious how these kinds of actions by tech companies don't violate section 230 though. In the early days of the WWW, that was the reason given for not moderating such speech - "if we start moderating any speech then we're not a safe harbor and we have to moderate all speech". Does this mean that these tech companies that are doing moderation expose themselves legally somehow? Or does it just mean that the previous arguments were done in bad faith? Or were there laws passed to refine section 230 in this regard?
> i think communication platforms should allow all (legal) posts
Do you? Really? Seems like everything would just be a spam-and-troll-filled wasteland...
There's nothing that prevents the President from being one of those trolls, and there's no strong reason for any given platform to give him special treatment forever if he persists in that behavior...
What you consider trolling might be someones genuine behavior. And your behavior can be seen as trolling by someone else. I dont want some arbitrary person or company to have the say who is trolling and who is not. Thats why I dont use facebook or twitter.
Yawn. Find less lazy talking points. Let's substitute "kicked out of a bar for being a loud obnoxious asshole" then, because that's also unwelcome despite not being illegal, and maps very well to trolling an online forum.
You're very eager to weaken the private property rights of others, as well as to give a LOT of power to the government (legality as the only consideration) and I don't think these thing would work out for you like you hope.
The concepts and values of free speech and open discourse are more than the legal requirements of the First Amendment. Coordinated private censorship by oligopolistic platforms that have largely replaced the public square is contrary to the value of freedom of speech.
This distinction doesn't exist under the actually existing version of §230.
I think it's shocking how Twitter has completely changed course from its "free speech wing of the free speech party" positioning, and I understand why people find it frustrating that you don't have to "choose between being a platform and a publisher". But you don't; that's not the law and it hasn't been the law for over a quarter-century. And that rule has mostly been a very good thing for online speech.
No, Twitter is within its right to remove stuff that goes against its policy. e.g. no one in their right mind would argue to keep a tweet up if it was a picture of child pornography.
Sure, but the point is that Twitter would be justified in proactively removing said content before a legal order to that effect got served.
More broadly, Twitter is not obligated to keep tweets up from anyone to anyone. It would be rather silly if, for example, all tweets from north america got deleted and people got up in arms accusing it of "censorship" (in a hypothetical scenario where unbeknownst to them, there was a catastrophic infrastructure failure).
Censorship doesn't need to be done by the government
From Oxford dictionary: "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."
Silicon valley has done a lot of harm over the last few years, and redefining words to mean things that benefit big tech companies is one of the worst things they have done.
The first ammendment only applies to the government, however the government is not the only institution capable of censorship.
Clearly I am not, and strawmanning me won't help the conversation.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you really did miss my point:
Twitter controls access to a very large audience, only rivalled maybe by Facebook. If you get banned from Twitter, you can't easily go and use a competitor. If there were tens or hundreds of Twitters in the world, then yeah, the "being thrown out of a bar" analogy would hold.
Twitter is not bigger than a head of state calling a presser. That audience is on multiple platform and T-dog is in a position to reach out to ANY media and they'll listen - and distribute.
Twitter also has its Terms of Service and we are all expected to follow those. There have been many that have been banned from Twitter for violent and/or hate speech. What makes the President any different? Why should he get held to a different standard?
There are many ways for anyone, let alone a president of the United States, to make his views known. He can call a press conference; call into a host on a favorable network; issue a press release. Somehow the 40-odd presidents of the US whose terms ended before Twitter did get themselves heard from.
I didn't take a picture, but one of his responses to the takeover of the Capitol was that "this is what happens" and a renewed demand to throw out the election.
While I have zero support for Trump supporters, aren't these websites protected by the government with Section 230? This isn't a right granted to these platforms by the constitution either, the fact that these social media are basically shielded from any civil responsibility when it comes user generated content, in fact that what made them thrive at scale... I'm just saying.
The argument over 230 is that one can't pretend to be a utility/platform for communication while at the same time restricting what information is allowed to be published. Lots of these platforms want to have the cake an eat it too; i.e. blacklisting news stories sitewide, banning certain political leanings 21:1, etc. while claiming to be a neutral platform provider that doesn't have a say in what's published.
> The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
It could very reasonably be seen as a violation of the principle of free speech as well. But it's not a violation of the first amendment. We need both of these concepts so we should be careful.
Agree. Censorship needs at least one type of modifier (are those adjectives?) so it's clear what is being limited. Some is good and some is bad but just "censorship" alone is too ambiguous.
Oh cool, so it’s okay if Facebook removes every post about and by BLM? Because they certainly incited a great deal of violence this summer.
Enough of the Doublespeak. It’s censorship, albeit by a private entity. When it inevitably happens to the left, I’ll call it censorship then too and I’ll advocate against it.
He said “they certainly incited a great deal of violence this summer.” I qualified that statement, which was worded to imply substantially more violence than what actually occurred.
I thought HN discussions were based on facts rather than political biases.
> so it’s okay if Facebook removes every post about and by BLM?
It's ok in the sense that they have every legal right to do so. It would lose them a ton of goodwill though, so they probably wouldn't do it. That's the free market at work.
The semantic arguments are pointless. The question is, do you want a private corporation to dictate whether or not the government of the United States is able to communicate to the citizens? If you do, you are effectively placing the leadership of the country at Twitter's discretion. Do you want to have a democracy where all voices can be heard, or do you want a small cadre of unelected corporate bureaucrats to decide what is allowed and not allowed?
We have an established democratic process to censure (not censor) and if necessary, remove from office elected officials. That is the appropriate venue and the appropriate authority to deal with this, not Twitter.
Twitter is not the be all end all of communicating with the world. That’s absurd and more indicative of a warped Silicon Valley centric worldview that overemphasizes the importance of Twitter and others.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is important, but not so much because it’s the only way for governments to communicate effectively with citizens. That’s absurd.
It doesn't have to be the only way and nobody said it was. It is a way, and an important one that is very effective at reaching a lot of people.
Government has long had the power to commandeer broadcast media when it needs to get a message to the people ("We interrupt this broadcast...") Do we want to do away with that?
For all its flaws, the government is still something every citizen of the US has a say in, however small. I'm not willing to trade that for rule by Twitter executives, however well-intentioned they might be at the present moment.
> Government has long had the power to commandeer broadcast media when it needs to get a message to the people (“We interrupt this broadcast…”)
No, it hasn’t (outside of, say, the Emergency Alert System.) Government addresses (“We interrupt this broadcast…”) are a subject of requests for air time, which broadcast networks usually (but not always) grant.
> The question is, do you want a private corporation to dictate whether or not the government of the United States is able to communicate to the citizens?
Generally, yes, I want private entities to decide whether or not to relay government messages. (The government should have its own facilities for basic necessary operational communication via the post, common carrier phone systems, etc., of course.)
The alternative is to surrender freedom of speech in favor of government direction of media.
There’s a very narrow space of cases where, with appropriate procedural safeguards, which start with legislation determining the need and setting the conditions of use, the government ought to be able to direct messages over private infrastructure that isn’t common-carrier; that role is pretty much covered by the Emergency Alert System [0] in the US.
> The alternative is to surrender freedom of speech in favor of government direction of media.
Delivering government messages does not preclude you from also delivering contradictory messages from others. Freedom of speech would involve delivering all messages, not just the ones you like. Requirement to deliver messages != direction of the media.
> Freedom of speech would involve delivering all messages, not just the ones you like.
No, my freedom of speech and the press means I don’t relay speech or use my press to reproduce messages I don’t think deserve to be relayed.
That’s pretty well established to be the meaning of that freedom.
> Requirement to deliver messages != direction of the media.
Yes, the state mandating that I use my resources (such as a printing press, or its digital analog) to reproduce and disseminate messages I disagree with relaying is direction of the media and (outside the usual strict scrutiny terms for restrictions on essential liberty) a violation of my First Amendment rights.
Twitter is a conduit, not a publisher. The speech on Twitter is the speech of the users, not the speech of Twitter itself. This is no different from AT&T deciding they they will only put through phone calls from Republican users, because why should they be forced to carry speech they disagree with?
1) The content of calls is not pushed to a dashboard mixed in with things you want to hear algorithmically. This core discovery feature of Twitter means that the content of the messages from people you are not subscribed to must meet some basic criteria of acceptability, or no one would use it.
2) We had common-carrier status applied to ISPs for a few short years before Ajit Pai got that rolled back for Verizon. You might have been able to extend that logic to Twitter and then I could see that as a fair comparison if that was how they were operating. But Twitter would never acquiesce to such an onerous mandate and would lobby hard against it.
> This core discovery feature of Twitter means that the content of the messages from people you are not subscribed to must meet some basic criteria of acceptability, or no one would use it.
If "This is a message from the President of the United States" does not meet the criteria of being something that a user might want to hear, what the hell does? And if the President is saying something completely insane then it's even more important that the people can hear exactly what he says! What would you prefer - you hear the President say an insane thing and you can say "yep, that guy is insane we need to get rid of him" or Twitter tells you "look, uh, just trust us this guy is insane, don't listen to him". In the second scenario, Twitter has all the power, and makes all the decisions about who gets to be an elected official, not you.
> We had common-carrier status applied to ISPs for a few short years before Ajit Pai got that rolled back for Verizon. You might have been able to extend that logic to Twitter and then I could see that as a fair comparison if that was how they were operating. But Twitter would never acquiesce to such an onerous mandate and would lobby hard against it.
"That's not currently how it is" and "Twitter wouldn't like it" don't strike me as particularly good reasons for not having a neutral carrier that accurately tells people the things their elected officials say.
Echoing the sentiments elsewhere in the thread, the office of the President has official avenues such as the White House Press Corps and EAS. I don't think Twitter has a particular duty to preserve or distribute the content of any user no matter who they are. It might be different if this was in the terms of service, or if it was something the executive branch was paying for.
If they changed their business practices to the model used by other network service providers commonly afforded neutral carrier status (i.e. SaaS, ISPs), then I think there might be a case for your second point.
Twitter is a publisher except for purposes of civil liability, and that only because Section 230 specifically, in an effort to promote largely automated, highly scalable, actively curated publication online, specifically exempts them and other similar online publishers from the liability treatment otherwise applicable to publishers.
> Freedom of speech would involve delivering all messages, not just the ones you like.
Why would freedom of speech involve delivering all messages to you, including the ones you don't want? What a strange concept of freedom that involves ceding control to others.
You could choose to unfollow or even block the President if you want. That would be maximal control for the individual. In this case Twitter has made the choice for you.
Has it been legally established that twitter should be treated like a government platform when governments use it? Can twitter be used and enforced like C-SPAN?
I just demanded my neighbor hang my banner on the front of his house, he seems to disagree with your reasoning. Can I give him your phone number so you can explain it to him?
>The question is, do you want a private corporation to dictate whether or not the government of the United States is able to communicate to the citizens?
no and luckily for you it cannot, because if the President of the US wants to speak on public matters he can do so through the White House press room.
However Donald J Trump, despite the fact that he thinks he is somehow synonymous with "The United States government", which he is not, can be thrown off any private platform that deems that necessary. Some people might have forgotten it over the last four years, but Donald Trump and his personal twitter account, and the office of the presidency, are not the same thing.
Your argument is completely flawed. Twitter has no Civic obligation here. As a Corporation they have a fiduciary responsibility, not to the President or his messaging, but to its broader users.
The fact that there was hate speech by a user, in this case the President, means that Twitter acted in support of its broader platform. It has no obligation to the President or to support his preferred communication platform for hate speech.
You don't think citizens have a right to hear exactly what their elected officials say in their own words? Maybe you are happy to outsource your judgement to Twitter. I'm not.
> You don’t think citizens have a right to hear exactly what their elected officials say in their own words?
I don’t think the state has the Constitutional power to compel private parties to relay what officials say outside of exceptional cases, because of freedom of speech and the press.
The right to hear isn’t the right to commandeer others resources to have it relayed to your hearing.
Twitter exists in the US, backed by US laws and the framework of the US society. Their ability to do business rests on contracts upheld by US courts. As such, they have certain responsibilities to the people of the United States.
One of those should be to refrain from using their power as a transmitter of information to manipulate the relationship between the people and their government. Maybe here, they have some noble purpose, do we trust that in the future they always will? Maybe in the future they would delete the accounts of Senators who call for antitrust investigations into Twitter. Who knows? Once they have the power, do you trust them to use it only for things you agree with?
A right to hear without any mechanism to enforce it is pointless.
We place reasonable restrictions on companies that serve the general public to ensure they treat all members of the public fairly. You can't decide not to serve certain customers because you don't like their skin color or religion, for example. Another reasonable requirement for a communications company would be that they accurately relay the communications that their users send, without interfering with or manipulating them to serve the company's own purposes.
Twitter can remove his "platform", while still showing his messages to those who directly followed him. i.e. don't show his messages except to people who specifically followed him.
This is like the Post Office deciding not to deliver mail.
> And incitement of violence has never been protected speech.
I saw an incitement to protest, but I saw nothing encouraging violence. Do you have an links to anything like that?
> This is like the Post Office deciding not to deliver mail.
Twitter isn’t a government corporation with a legally-mandatory monopoly, so, no, its more like me choosing not to pass on something I got from a politician a disagree with.
> You probably wouldn’t be passing it on to several million people, so that comparison isn’t even close.
If freedom of speech and the press is curtailed precisely because the speaker or publisher has a large audience so the curtailment most efficiently gives government control of messaging, that doesn’t make it better.
> Why do you think Twitter is a publisher, in the sense of a newspaper, for example?
Because, like a newspaper, they provide an actively curated compilation of information received from a variety of contracted sources to readers. Sure, much (but not all) of the curation is algorithmic, and the direct sources are mostly not under employment contract and not getting paid money for the content (either providing it for free or paying money for reach), while for most newspapers many of the direct sources would be under employment contract and they and others would be getting paid money for the input they provide into the curated product, but that difference doesn't seem particularly relevant to whether Twitter is a publisher. And, yes, a lot of the algorithmic curation is driven by explicit reader expression of preference, and some of the rest is driven by inferred reader preference from reader behavior. But that the curated product is highly personalized also doesn't seem relevant to how free expression rights apply to curation choices.
For purposes of civil liability, Twitter is not a “publisher” solely because of Section 230, but since we are discussing how the Constitution applies to them (which Congress could not change by statute) not how civil liability applies to them, that's not relevant.
My argument was that because of network effects there are only a few dominant platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and that when these platforms take down content, they are in practise preventing that person's message from getting out, i.e. censoring people.
This gives them a lot of power: power to decide which ideas can be disseminated, power to decide which politicians can get elected. So if you favour democracy, you have to be against the power of big tech platforms to shut down discussions they don't like.
(My favoured solution would involve mandate interoperability using ActivityPub and similar protocols, which breaks the dominance of big platforms due to network effects).
What if, by way of uncritically publishing everything that everybody says, Twitter is accessory to treason? Do they have a right to demur? Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in?
> What if, by way of uncritically publishing everything that everybody says, Twitter is accessory to treason?
I'm not sure that a communications network passing on their users' communications would amount to treason.
But let's run with that for instance, and assume it did, in law.
> Do they have a right to demur?
Clearly if a course of action is against the law, they have a legal obligation not to do it. True by definition.
As to whether they have a moral obligation, that's another question entirely, and a rather complex one, as one would have to define what is moral. I would say that a company that wishes to continue operating in a country is going to have to obey the laws of that country.
> Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in?
Well, that all depends on whether transmitting other people's messages constitutes a crime. Realistically, no company is going to do things that would get it shut down (and if they did, they wouldn't do so for long).
Lots of comments are being voted down disagreeing with the literal definition of censorship.
Whatever your position on this issue, it is certainly alarming that on hackernews intellectual arguments over the meaning of a word are sent down the memoryhole.
Doublespeak is really becoming an issue in our society, and a subset of our population is censoring those that point it out.
How big & immediate (powerful) leaders' reach were 200 years ago?
Were they able to send their message to 10s millions of people instantly and lead them to things? or how long would it take them to reach all those people.
I wonder if today's leaders have a very different power compared to when most of these laws and systems were put in place?
It was less immediate, but anyone who wanted to respond was similarly constrained, so there wasn't much difference in actual power. The coup against Peter III of Russia is an instructive historical example; Catherine couldn't instantly send her message everywhere, but neither could anyone else, so she just had to visit power centers one by one and convince them that she was in charge.
Mention of Russian coups reminded me of the following quite relevant Lenin quote[1] that for some reason was repeated enough times by Soviet media to be easily recognizable by anyone born in the USSR:
"Our three main forces—the fleet, the workers, and the army units—must be so combined as to occupy without fail and to hold at any cost: (a) the telephone exchange; (b) the telegraph office; (c) the railway stations; (d) and above all, the bridges."
In the 1830 King Charles the 10 of France has issued certain proclamations, but nobody found out out because the printers refused to print them, and instead spent their energy and paper on liberal revolutionary materials.
Charles pissed them off a couple days earlier by trying to hoist onerous censorship so they showed him a middle finger.
You don't need to go back 200 years even. First Oval Office address was made by Hoover in 1929, less than 100 years ago. Television appearances started happening post-war, first apparently by Truman in 1947, but really more common from 50s onward. In the 18th and 19th centuries you heard what the president said through newspapers, subject to whatever editorial policies each happened to have.
> Were they able to send their message to 10s millions of people instantly and lead them to things?
No, definitely not. Some states would have had mechanisms for distributing stuff that the leaders wanted publicised, but it wouldn't generally have been all that common. And, in practice, in many cases, if the leader happened to be insane, the system would suppress it. George III wasn't bothering everyone in Britain with weird rants every few hours, say.
The ability of leaders to harangue the general public whenever they feel like it is, in practice, _very_ new; basically since Twitter became popular.
This is blatant censorship of the President of the United States, regardless of anyone's thoughts or opinions about him.
Edit: It may be fun to downvote and might make some feel great for a period of time, but it doesn't change the fact that the President of the country of free speech is being censored.
The constitution also lays out what crimes a president can be impeached for. I have to explicitly say this so people don’t misinterpret my words: I’m not supporting trump, I’m talking from a purely scholastic position.
You can look up respected legal scholars from Georgetown who came to This conclusion during Clinton’s impeachment
Crazy how the police took such a hands-off approach to keeping the riot out of the capitol. I saw a video of police opening up the barricade line so they could come past it. Such a stark contrast to police action during the BLM protests.
I wonder what the chain of command was who told these cops to essentially do nothing today. Who does the buck stop with?
Like when they took over several square blocks of Seattle for a month and declared independence and weren't stopped by the cops until their private police force killed too many black teenagers?
1. The Seattle protests did not storm any buildings, force people out of their workplaces, or planted any bombs.
2. The SPD, for a reason they still can't explain, and against the orders of both Mayor Durkan, and Police Chief Best, chose to leave the East Precinct, and then, in a petty manner, stopped responding to calls in the entire Capitol Hill area.
3. The CHAZ occupied a public park, and the streets of the surrounding block. It did not stop the operation of businesses, legislatures, or government. It did not prevent the police from accessing the area.
What we're seeing here, is a failed coup - an attempt to prevent the peaceful, democratic transfer of power by force, at the behest of a politician. I can't believe that you can't tell the difference between a coup, and a protest. One is treason and insurrection, which carries the death penalty, while the other is a constitutionally protected right.
Police have said a lot of things in Seattle that turned out to be complete falsehoods. Nearly every night of the protest, they'd make false statements that were trivially disproved by video evidence.
I'll believe it when its a citation from an impartial third party - a paramedic, a bystander, etc.
The fact is, the police retained access to both the East Precinct, and to CHAZ, through the latter's existence. They would show up in small groups of two or three, and were allowed in.
Do you realize how biased you come across? You can pick whatever "evidence" or "source of evidence" you want but you'd still need to apply that standard to "both sides".
Literally any organization has a history of lying. Completely pointless statement. You have to applies the same standards to both sides. If you want them impossible high then go for it.
If you only believe what you have seen with your own eyes then fine. But you cant make any statements about anything you have not seen then.
I do give a small amount of consideration to the sacredness of the capitol, and the additional damage that images of blood spilled on the steps of our capitol would do.
Well that doesn't make sense. The sacredness of the capitol should demand that it be protected. Images of law enforcement preventing a mob from disrupting the act of signing off on the transfer of power would be a strong statement that needs to be made, I think.
The juxtaposition of this vs the indiscriminate violence police used in the summer against protestors on the streets is pretty jarring.
The fact that a large mob of people like this - many of them armed, and some of them planting explosives - breaking into the Capitol, taking things and causing a bunch of damage, results in only a small handful of arrests is pretty crazy, too.
I agree that they can deescalate when they want to. However, the way I understand the defund the police idea was to defund and eventually get their needed funds back with lots of reform. The prospect of funds does change things quite a bit. Always! At this point they're overfunded so no carrot to get them to move forward.
Most "defund the police" opponents I personally know are furious that protesters were ever allowed to enter the building and are demanding to see everyone who did arrested.
It's hard to even get that far at this point. They (and I - I don't want to pretend to be a neutral party here) are still reeling from the idea that you can forcibly enter the US Capitol without being shot dead on the spot. Basically everything we thought we knew about the typical processes of policing is, apparently, wrong.
That's fair. I won't rub salt in the wound; seeing this all unfold on video is way more chilling than I'd anticipated. All I'll ask is that once you feel up to it, you have a candid discussion with someone on the other side of the issue about why they feel such drastic action is necessary.
It's only crazy if you think the rule of law is applied consistently, fairly, and apolitically.
If you've followed the history of protest in this country, you'll find it difficult to believe any of these things. From suffragist, to labour, to the civil rights movement, unarmed left-wing protests are routinely brutalized by police. Armed right-wing protests are not.
Who would have thought that people with guns are less likely to be brutalized by the gov or literally anyone. Almost sounds like a pro-gun argument to me but I'm sure it wasn't mean to be one. The victims must be victims because the evils are evil right. That their own actions or inactions makes them the victim just doesn't fit the victim mentality of some. Its just one of many things that shows how they are so out of touch with reality. Did no one ever told these leftist that life isn't fair, that people dont play by the rules, that having right doesn't mean you also get it? We should strive for the perfect world but it will never exist and only a fool would walk the earth as if it where paradise already.
When someone is brutalized by another human because they don't have a gun, of course that's because people are being evil! How dare you say they made themselves a victim?
Not what I said.
There is a right to bear arms in the US. Its specifically there to prevent the gov form getting to powerful and abuse its power. The people who decide on their own free will that guns should be removed form the people put themself and others in the victim position. If you get brutalized by anyone and you voluntary dont want to defend yourself that Is victim mentality. If you CANT defense yourself (for whatever reason) that's a different situation.
No, thats not what I said. Your misinterpretation starts at the very first sentence.
I said "people with guns are less likely to be brutalized by the gov or literally anyone."
>And trying to do self defense with a gun is a terrible idea in most circumstances.
statistics say otherwise also statistics cant even capture the self defenses that weren't needed because someone had a gun and could have used it if needed.
>(Though trying to fight government abuse with a gun is also a terrible idea.)
trying to fighting against anyone isn't self defense. no where did I say anything the like you just made that up.
>Deciding not to carry around a gun is very different from deciding not to defend yourself. It's not victim mentality.
You are seem unable to completely read and understand my post. You cant just pick one part and ignore the rest. I clear said that if you cant defend yourself its not the same as if you voluntary dont want to. There are many valid reasons why you would not carry a gun and so if you dont have one you obliviously cant us it. Not the same as if you want to have guns removed from anyone so people no longer have a choice.
> No, thats not what I said. Your misinterpretation starts at the very first sentence. I said "people with guns are less likely to be brutalized by the gov or literally anyone."
I'm not sure what the 'no' refers to?
Your original post said "the gov or literally anyone". Your second post only talked about the gov part, so I reminded you about the "literally anyone" part. Where's the misinterpretation?
> trying to fighting against anyone isn't self defense. no where did I say anything the like you just made that up.
Let me rephrase. Self defense against the government with a gun is a terrible idea.
> You are seem unable to completely read and understand my post. You cant just pick one part and ignore the rest. I clear said that if you cant defend yourself its not the same as if you voluntary dont want to.
You did say that. You also equated choosing not to carry a gun with choosing not to defend yourself, with the phrases "Who would have thought that people with guns are less likely to be brutalized by the gov or literally anyone." and "their own actions or inactions makes them the victim"
Are you telling me you didn't mean to equate those? If so then your original post was written misleadingly, and I don't even know who you're even accusing of victim mentality anymore.
If you did mean to equate those, then I still think your opinion is hot garbage.
Are we living in parallel universes? This was 1 day of protests and it resulted in the police or another authority killing 1 protestor. That is an objectively more violent record from the authorities than the average BLM protest. I see people non-ironically saying if BLM conducted this protest the police would have shot them.
Even without comparing to BLM, the actions of the people that raided the Capitol should be condemned on their own. There is no need to bring in BLM as a crutch to make the case. It just makes it less weaker than it is.
This is an assault on democracy. We don't need to explicitly cite double standards to make our case. Stop comparing what's going on on the Capitol with BLM protests.
Why? The contrast is important and highlights how difficult it is to peacefully assemble for a noble cause if armed representatives of the state are determined to abuse and provoke a response out of you. It underscores the hypocrisy of people who said that they would support BLM in abstract if not for “all the violence.”
Turns out the violence had nothing to do with it, which was obvious all along of course. But it’s good to know for sure.
Because, if we need to make the case for opposing treason/insurrection by using black lives matter protests for social justice as a crutch - completely orthogonal reasons for protests, boy... we look weak.
The comparison to Black Lives Matter rioting is important. I find it very bizarre that the media correctly calls these idiots rioters, but they call the Black Lives Matter idiots doing the same sort of thing protestors.
I saw both words used in the BLM riots and both words used today. "The Media" is not a monolith. Different organizations spin the story different ways.
Reminder: BLM protests had wide-scale looting. Looters breaking into luxury stores and hauling off with anything not bolted down. Not the same scope. Not the same standard.
Reminder - in Seattle, looting and property damage only started hours after the police started throwing tear gas and firing less-lethal bullets into protestors, and the entire downtown area turned into chaos.
In Bellevue, the police did neither, and instead, talked with the protesters, and there was no looting anywhere near the protest areas.
If you actually cared about minimizing looting, you should probably not attack peaceful protestors on public streets. The chaos that starts is what gives looters cover to operate.
Yet another reminder: looting perhaps already started elsewhere in other parts of the country. Also the Rodney king riots had a precedent of looting. Learning from past lessons would be wise.
Also as you imply, why would being treated poorly by a public servant (the police) justify the looting of an unrelated private party? It doesn’t. One is not a justified cause for the other.
The videos that I saw were far from being like that... they were using tear gas and blocking them but it is plausible that they got in because they let them.
It’s not clear to me that the direction the protesters walk is towards the capitol. They could just as easily be letting people who didn’t want to be associated with the rioting leave the protest.
Those people are being let past a barrier to where a lot of other people already are. So it doesn't look like they are getting let in to a restricted area.
Maybe we're just seeing the police manage crowd flow.
Without some context I don't see that this shows anything bad happening here.
It's not even clear the barricades, which didn't even meet in middle, were even moved by the police. The only police I can clearly make out are in the center and when the camera zooms in I can't see who moved the barricades away.
It's a bit amazing this video is being peddled around HN as evidence of anything; there is so little context.
So we should delete it just in case ryt?
Or at least put a message under it that makes sure people use their brain even less because they are told that the video shows something but has no context and thus should only be used for entertaining purpose.
I don't have a horse in this and I don't know the area to maybe spot something about it that makes it look worse, but isn't that/couldn't it just be 'kettling'?
Kettling involves directing protestors to an area to be arrested or otherwise forced to leave -- not to allow them easier access to join the rest of the rioters at the Capitol.
But does the video show them having 'access to join the rest of the rioters at the Capitol', or does it just show them being allowed to move from one area to another?
(Not knowing the area/layout/etc. as I said) I just see the latter, with it implied they're about to rush up the steps, but where they go (there or otherwise) unshown.
Well... this mob surely had protest as a reason (or at least a declared reason) to assemble and storm the building, so - yes, why not? There are other words that are applicable, but "protestor" is a semantically valid option.
Unless by the "right word" you meant "how they should be called". But then it becomes a highly subjective question.
There were two deaths, one of which was a black man being murdered by Proud Boys, and the other does not have evidence suggesting it was related to the Seattle AZ (other than they were near the perimeter).
Yes, seems to be very hard to grasp for some people that they would fight and use whatever means necessary to stop people who would literally stab, shoot or set them on fire if they turn their back also they demand them to kneel in front of them and what not. Some of them where directly coming for the cops directly attacking them or setting buildings on fire where they where inside. While the people who stormed the building today had zero interest in the cops. The protest was against the other people in the building not the cops. Even after the woman got shot there was no sign of revenge against cops. There is even evidence that cops where immediately given access to the victim to save her (which apparently wasn't possible anymore).
This is being discussed extensively at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661474 and there are many comments along the same lines, though you may have to click More (at the bottom) once or twice to get to them.
All the comments along these lines seem to be factually untrue, considering that the police killed a protestor at this protest. That alone makes this one of the most aggressive police responses to a protest in the past year, even ignoring the thousands of national guard and police in riot gear who responded with pepper spray, tear gas, and guns.
You've unfortunately broken the site guidelines repeatedly lately. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN in the intended spirit? If we can't rely on established users like you to do that, this place is really doomed.
Stop them from getting in. Not nicely escort them out, but arrest them? (although I assume the FBI et al are archiving posted pictures and videos as we speak). It's not like they don't know how to do that, see any other protest at the capitol.
Stunning. Regardless of political lean, and the inevitable Supreme Court hearing on this action, it is unprecedented that a company has the power to silence a sitting president.
Twitter holds the power, but do they not also by definition hold the responsibility of the content on their platform when it costs lives?
Didn't any media company in US history have at all times the power not to publish statements by the US President? Why should the US President have command over their printing press/servers? It's not like Twitter has a monopoly, either.
Same kinda of thing they have done in the past the First Amendment trumps companies rights
> ... noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
IANAL, but I think there’s a pretty substantial difference between “prevent distribution” and “refuse to publish”. There are some cases in 1A caselaw where mandatory publishing is a thing, but they’re extraordinarily limited and generally public health/safety oriented and proscribed by the state.
I’d be shocked if even this court went so far as to mandate a private company devote its resources to providing content that violates its own rules.
Twitter is a private entity that can do whatever they want with their platform. If he or his supporters don’t like that he’s welcome to leave for another platform.. parler was created for this.
Perhaps grab a mirror and look for some personal responsibility?
Why is $ELECTED_OFFICIAL using a private platform to disseminate communications related to the office, instead of using a public service to do the same? Did Twitter ask for that? Does a private company have to allow public officials (esp. non-law-enforcement) to use its platform as they wish--don't we have a 3rd amendment for a reason?
If only the President had some sort of way to get a message out…perhaps something like a conference…with the press…I don’t know, it’s obviously an idea ripe for disruption.
(Or he could post a message to the White House website.)
I mean ... they don't. Twitter is really not that big of a deal. Removing his ability to tweet means ... almost nothing. He can still talk to the press, post to other social media, hold press conferences from the white house press room, he has no shortage of ways of getting his message out there.
It's amazing that the reactions to this are both "should have banned him years ago for violating their rules" and "this is blatant dangerous censorship." Whichever side you're on, this is a lose-lose situation for twitter.
He is, but maybe there’s some survivorship bias there. We can’t really ask the shadowbanned people what they think of the moderation because they’re shadowbanned.
Most of the things they have to say are reasonable most of the time. Like mundane comments about programming languages and whatnot.
I think they would be pretty pissed off to know that they've been banned for months or more because they said something that rubbed the mods the wrong way at one point.
> I think they would be pretty pissed off to know that they've been banned for months or more because they said something that rubbed the mods the wrong way at one point.
We know, but some of us enjoy reminding Ian Murdock's friends-in-need of what they did.
Preferably before it's their turn to ask for help...
> We can’t really ask the shadowbanned people what they think of the moderation because they’re shadowbanned.
Just flip the showdead switch in settings and you can enjoy the infinite wisdom and feistiness of banned users. Can’t be easier. For instance, in this thread there’s exactly one banned sibling, making a gross, sexual personal attack.
Which always puzzles me. I have showdead on, just to get the whole picture. And because it is sometimes hilarious, to be honest. But how an you not realize you have been banned, when everyone on here is talking about it?
Far fewer people are shadowbanned these days. And I think if people are commenting reasonably without realising they are shadowbanned, dang will try to get in touch to let them know they are banned.
I don't think the incendiary rhetoric of most of Twitter (let alone Trump) would pass muster with HN moderation.
Edit: People downvoting me even though I'm right. Take most of the comments you see on Twitter in subject matter and/or delivery, and they would be either downvoted or moderated off this platform. No-one in good faith (who has had reasonable exposure to Twitter) could argue this is not the case. Just to be clear, I believe this to be a good thing.
Could that just be a size thing? I remember Twitter being a lot more sane place before it was overrun by politics a few years ago. Or maybe the algorithm was better at keeping that stuff away?
I think large scale makes it impossible to be good. Small scale doesn't guarantee good.
Reddit, slashdot, and a whole slew of others went through an HN-like phase of high-quality discussions and content before turning into cesspools.
I think what makes HN unique is benevolent sponsorship. There isn't pressure to grow. It's recruiting for Y-Combinator, which eliminates most of the normal pressures.
My favorite article on the life cycle (growth & collapse) of online communities is “Attacked from Within”* from the old kuro5hin site. I’ve always been curious to how it’s suggested solutions to the moderation problem would turn out.
i also think it's a content thing. the content of HN doesn't lend itself to lunatics most of the time. i say "most" because it certainly happens (see the early covid threads and the hatred spewed for anyone questioning or even just wondering aloud about the lockdowns)
I don't want to blame @dang for this, but I see plenty of people talking about the toxic content of "The orange website", and several people have bothered to explicitly block links from here.
HN doesn't believe that men hate women, believes there may be differences in sex beyond our genitals, and believes that someone taking offence at something doesn't make it immoral to disagree with them.
I dunno, I was friends in college with someone who moderated a subreddit whose head mod was univesally hated to the point where a rival subreddit formed and eventually outpaced the original.
I have to say from everything I heard about the guy, and my own rare interactions with him, the hatred of him was 100% justified. Some people are just very shitty and lack any sympathizers.
There is a problem when the umpire is an empire. If HN decided to ban Trump, no one but local hacker population would notice. In case of services with billions of registered users, quantity has its own quality.
Facebook, Twitter et al. built enormous platforms for speech and thus got caught up in the middle of all cultural and political conflicts on this planet. Not just American election(s), but elections in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Germany, UK, Brazil, plus religious conflicts such as Islamists vs. people who draw Muhammad.
They cannot possibly stay neutral in all those wars at once and when they start taking sides, they will be hated first and then, later, either dismembered or regulated to be a de-facto arm of the government.
so in the end you have to anchor this to some expertise and grounded-in-reality judgement.
For example, the majority in the aforementioned poll believed that COVID-19 was created in a lab in China. And to be honest, an average person really has no way of truly knowing this. They're not virologists or spies. They can only judge based on a gut feeling whether China is/isn't evil, and that is likely based on other things they've heard, which may include rumors, propaganda and Bond movies.
I haven't heard of the false equivalence before, but it doesn't sound like this. There is that popular fallacy though, but I'm not aware if it has a name, where people think that the truth is always in the middle (the golden middle).
And you could say that this is it, but given the strong polarization and extremism around topics that involve politics it might be a good measure in this case. (Of course, depending on what exactly 'everybody' means.) By definition extremists of either side will see independent actors as hostile. But, of course, this is just a measure, not a proof.
The umpire is not going to advocate for either stand in this metaphor. The umpire will restrict or disseminate information for both sides. If the umpire does so in a way that irritates both parties, then they are doing so equally. Thus why PC said this.
> There is no popular position with moderation, everyone hates the umpire.
Afaik, one big issue is that this account was operating under different rules then everybody else. As in, twitter was more permissive with Trump then with other people.
They were not content neutral. They by themselves said that they wont apply the same rules on Trump then on other political players on twitter. They did not wanted to ban or limit him, because he was president and thus special.
That is not being content neutral. Had it been content neutral, his account would be policed the same way as other peoples years ago.
And they will, once he's out, but they have made a formal statement effectively stating Trump's account gets preferential treatment for being such a powerful person.
Of course, the cynical reason is that Trump's tweets are responsible for a significant percentage of Twitter's "engagement" metrics; I'm sure that internally they have figures that indicate how much revenue they generate from Trump alone.
It’s not just the engagement. It’s the publicity and brand awareness too. Every time the news wants to report on what trump said, they talk about and link to twitter.
I sa an interview with Nicole Wallace today, the Nicole Wallace from MSNBC that used to be on W. Bush's WH team. Never thought I would agree someone from the W. admin, but she was right in saying, that she hersefl and the media at large were way to soft on trump, already before the election. I gues the same can be said about social media.
i do get the diffficult choice Twitter faced, Trump was / is the president. So everything he says is part of the official record. So I guess banning his personal account would ba quite difficult. Twitter, Facebook, YoutTube and so on could have added disclaimers already much earlier, so.
I believe that the blame is hard to pin here. Instinctively I have blamed media for not reporting the truth, which led people to believing in so many mutually exclussive news. However, because the news media have to compete with social media they are bound to put out cheaper and more clickbaity content or go extinct.
>It's amazing that the reactions to this are both "should have banned him years ago for violating their rules" and "this is blatant dangerous censorship." Whichever side you're on, this is a lose-lose situation for twitter.
A month from now Trump will not be on Twitter. Nobody will actually see what he allegedly says but he'll be gone.
my gut says the moment trump is not in office he starts a news channel or some sort of media company, I bet he even still have rallies. he'll leverage his supporters to influence elections and politics.
i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
>my gut says the moment trump is not in office he starts a news channel or some sort of media company, I bet he even still have rallies. he'll leverage his supporters to influence elections and politics.
You're right, no doubt. Though technically all the previous presidents do that. even Michelle Obama is on book tours and such. George W Bush does stuff with Michelle Obama as well.
>i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
True even before potus.
Here's the reality though. The political divide in the USA is at like 30+ year high. It used to be just democrats who divided. Republicans hadnt really changed much over the last several decades.
With platforms like twitter pushing republicans off their platform. It means the echo chamber will be becoming much worse. The political divide just begun for the republicans. The divide will become much larger than it is today because there's even less intermingling.
i think Trump will go beyond book tours, i think you're going to see "TrumpTV" and serious competition for other traditionally conservative leaning outlets like fox news etc.
>Wait, is Twitter pushing republicans off their platform? I’m not a Twitter user, but this would surprise me.
The joe rogan podcast #1258 with Jack Dorsey and Tim Pool is a pretty good watch. Twitter has extensively banned right-wing personalities off their platform while outright allowing left-wing people break the rules.
For example Twitter recently blocked virtually all negative news about Joe biden and hunter biden during the election. For example in place of blocking the NYpost's coverage of hunter biden's corruption. They banned people to hide the story and then put a counter news article that called it fake news as trending.
Flipside, Twitter allowed Smollet's hate crime hoax. Twitter allows celebrities calling for the death of that maga hat kid. They allowed the russian collusion stuff that turned out to be completely false.
Banning him years ago would be censorship but with clear rules equally applied to all.
Now we are unequal censorship.
Twitter is trending down and will probably not recover but they were going to take a nosedive after Trump left. This gives them political points with the left.
No, it is a win-win for Twitter and FB and YT. They have made billions on the faux tribalism fight. Look at Parler: it is a ghost town because people want to argue and pwn the other side. Just talking to other people that agree with you is boring and not sticky. Twitter and FB and YT and FN and CNN and the rest have the sole goal of outrage to get more views and more ad revenue. This is the root of the problem.
I find it odd to say taking him off twitter is censorship. Twitter is used by 22% of adult Americans (according to Pew).
Trump and any president, on a whim can speak live to all Americans through all cable news channels. He could have called NBC, Fox, CBS, ABC etc to the Oval Office and in 5 minutes be live on basically every channel (including being streamed live on twitter). Instead he choose Twitter.
Apparently somewhere between 30 and 40% of adult Americans get news from TV, depending on whose surveys you look at. And cable news is only 16-19% of adults, having fallen enormously since 2016 and 2017 surveys. It was more than twice the proportion just a few years ago!
But yeah, he can always address the press and let the press disseminate his statements, which has its own pros and cons.
The deleted tweets could be considered "a lie" or whatever but srsly nothing in there justifies deleting it. He's actively calling for peace, law & order and to let the blue do their job.
The problem with censorship is that ###### and that you cant #####. There is also no way to argue why you agree/disagree with it because #######.
> He's actively calling for peace, law & order and to let the blue do their job.
What a wild selective (mis)reading of his Twitter account. Did you miss the parts where he said he loved the people who stormed the Capitol with rifles today? Or the part where he said the vice president should just declare him the winner of the election?
Like I said call it a "lie" if he says dumb/not true stuff. He could say Stalin was a great person or whatever who cares. I certainly dont need or want twitter to decide whether that should be read or not.
>Did you miss the parts where he said he loved the people who stormed the Capitol with rifles today?
He never said that that that's just total nonsense not even misinterpretation that straight made up BS.
You could just as well says he said he loves rapists because it happens to be that at least one of the person at the protest was a convicted rapist. If that's how you interpret things from someone you dont like you have a serious problem with reality.
Hes speech was to the people who attender the protest not specifically to thous who entered the building which obviously where a minority. And even if he included the people who entered the building he did not encourage them in any way to do anything they should not do, in fact if he includes them he too told them to go home peacefully.
I have no clue what you interpret into this that isn't there.
"We" is him and his supporters, "you" are the people that supported him. There is nothing controversial. And noting that could somehow be spinned to make it bad. But somehow you still see something evil in there. Its called bias.
We is him, you is the people on the Capitol grounds. The rest of the message sets the context that this is clearly aimed at the protestors. I don't know what's preventing you from seeing this.
That literally what I said. He speaks to all the people there not specifically to thous who broke laws. And he called for peace, law and order and to go home. But somehow you came to the conclusion that "he said he loved the people who stormed the Capitol with rifles today" Cant you see how biased that is? You just picked the <0.001% of protestors that apparently stormed the capitol with rifles.
Why not pick the >90% while people just pretend that he only addresses them and thus only love white people so he must be racist right? You can make up any shit you want with such a retarded non-logic way of interpreting what he clearly said to all the people there.
Some people here despise Facebook for privacy concerns, but it's still a useful private network for family and friends not constrained by the message/length format.
Twitter generates so much negativity, so much strife between people who constantly yell at each other over nothing that socially it is the most toxic place on the internet.
As for public officials using Twitter, a private company for their main communication channel instead of using government websites, they need to stop doing that.
Glad I'm not the only one that feels that way about twitter. When I first used it and saw all the hate speech and negative comments I was like "who on earth would even use this platform?" It really reminded me of 4chan.
4chan is almost certainly less toxic than Twitter at the societal level. And due to its design (anonymity etc) it may also be less toxic to the average individual participant, in terms of emotional/psychological harm.
> As for public officials using Twitter, a private company for their main communication channel instead of using government websites, they need to stop doing that.
That's a relevant point and I hope every public official would do this. However, what people seem to miss is that Twitter, just like other social media such as Facebook or Instagram, started to, in people's mind, transform into a public agora and lose their private status. The thing is they gained so much power and became so essential and valuable as far as society and political life are concerned that they're now considered as communication channels where everyone, including public officials, should have the right to express their opinion as long as it doesn't break the TOS, which is something I can, in fact, hardly disapprove.
> Twitter generates so much negativity, so much strife between people who constantly yell at each other over nothing that socially it is the most toxic place on the internet.
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!
I think I get the logic. "Go home" is de-escalating, but "sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long" is repeating the same claim that's stoking the madness, and repeating it in very incendiary terms. Yeah, it might be reasonable to ban that.
No, it's not implicit. Why is your football analogy reasonable at all? There is also the matter of the general pattern of conduct that president Trump has established over the last few months, which is more relevant here. If you tell people that the election is being stolen and as patriotic Americans they ought to do something about it, as he has been doing, and you keep saying that for quite a while, you then lose the claim that there is an implicit "despite" in anything you say, especially since the call to civility is such a small part of the tweet. If you look at all the other things he's said the calls to civility are also quite small and token there too. Like most people, if he wanted to say it he's quite capable of saying it properly. So it's not implicit, it's just a rhetorical tactic he uses.
You're making the case that Trump is inciting violence despite him explicitely deescalating, based on literally how many words were spent on deescalating vs. anything else, among other things. I think just the fact that this is such a hair-splitting discussion makes it very evident Twitter shouldn't have banned him for "severe violations".
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
It’s quite ironic that people think this is a first amendment or censorship issue when the real first amendment issue would be if Twitter were not allowed to do this.
Correct, but the spirit of the law says that it should be universally accepted. Otherwise we'll all end up like in Orban's Hungary, with almost all the media technically in private hands but practically speaking in Orban's pockets (if I'm not mistaken a similar thing is now happening in Poland).
Nearly every media institution has reported on every development of the Assange case as it happened, including this past week, when they all covered the latest outcome in the case.
And there has been no further news, so the news media moved on to other news, like the siege of the U.S. Capitol building.
There are still independent media in Poland. (like third most watched TV station, Discovery-owned TVN) (though ruling party likely looks how to buy them; eg. recently national oil company bought publisher of several local newspapers)
The spirit of the law says that it should be universally accepted
No it doesn't. In the U.S., the law is explicitly clear that censorship by the government is subject to strict limitations, but censorship by private parties is part of those parties' exercise of their own rights to free speech. Compelling one person to spread the speech of another person is a form of censorship that censors the former's opposition to the latter's speech.
There are only a handful of cases that compel private parties to tolerate speech they disagree with on their own property (basically, malls), and the scope has been narrowed over time. (See Pruneyard and subsequent cases.)
I've just mentioned a concrete case of how one can subvert the letter of the law in order to suppress said free speech, with no free speech you have a very high risk of returning to tyranny (to use one of the terms most feared by the guys who wrote the Federalist Papers), and it is my understanding that that fear (among a very few others) permeates the whole basic law of the United States (i.e. its Constitution).
Things like "private parties", property rights, I'd say that even the idea of "government", come after that fear has been dealt with.
Trump was America's Orban, if I understand what you were saying. Forcing Facebook, Twitter, et al, to carry his speech, as putative head of the U.S. government, is the tyranny and censorship that you should be railing against, because it violates FB's and Twitter's constitutional rights not to transmit violent speech that they disagree with.
Private property, private rights, and government, have all existed before the "fear" (whatever it is you mean by that) was dealt with.
> have all existed before the "fear" (whatever it is you mean by that) was dealt with.
I'm talking about the basis of the US Constitution, its "spirit", so to speak. My reading of the Federalist Papers is that one of the main reasons-to-be of the Constitution was to avoid tyranny, the men that wrote that thing down put things like respecting private property or even what form of government to use after that. I admit, maybe I'm wrong on that interpretation (I've read them about three years ago), but I've recently started reading a selection of Anti-federalist Papers and I stand by my opinion.
> FB's and Twitter's constitutional rights
Again, there was nothing in the Federalist Papers (nor in the Constitution) about respecting the rights of private, abstract, soulless entities. Yes, I know about the relatively recent decision that gave those corporations a "political soul" (so to speak), but that decision had nothing to do with the original spirit of the basic law on which the USA was founded.
The tricky question is whether twitter is in essence a public square. Arguably they've made a new space - governed by nothing but their own corporate policies.
I mean, if conversations on twitter are akin to conversations in a public park in the USA, then you would expect the same social / legal conventions to hold on twitter as in public spaces. If I incited violence in the local park, there are norms and laws that come into play. Arguably the same laws should hold on twitter. From that perspective, its weird that a tech company acts as the judge and jury - rather than the police and the courts. And complaints about censorship make total sense.
But if you think of twitter, google, facebook etc as corporate serfdoms, then there's no problem with twitter's enforcement. Twitter is a space owned and ruled by a tech company. You rent your twitter account, but own nothing. Twitter can set any rules they like, or set no rules and act entirely capriciously. The interesting question is whether or not we want the internet to work like a weird echo of the middle ages. And what (if anything) we should do about it.
"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us.
I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the capitalist structure in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives." [1]
> The tricky question is whether twitter is in essence a public square. Arguably they've made a new space - governed by nothing but their own corporate policies.
Public squares do not have corporate policies. Twitter has never been a public square they've always enforced speech rules from the beginnings.
It's obviously not a first amendment is since that restricts what the fed gov can do, but it is a free speech issue which is a philosophy thought to be better than censoring opposing ideas. It's a legal issue in regards to section 230 which only protects open platforms from liability from user content. If Twitter whats to be a publisher with editorial authority then they should be held to the same standard as NYT and CNN.
again this awful misreading of 230. No, the law explicitly does not demand a platform be 'open', or neutral or censor free. That is completely nuts, because it would imply hackernews and your personal blog would be legally liable publishers as soon as you start to moderate content. Which is obviously silly because any content-specific platform that controls what it serves would be legally liable and effectively unable to operate on the internet.
230 grants platforms both freedom from liability and gives them the ability to moderate. They do not need to pick.
I think most people who say they
This are advocating for 230 to be rewritten, not misreading it. Personally, I think that individual curation of content should be considered an editorial decision, and not simply moderation. Tightly moderated forums where everyone sees the same posts are fine, but twitter/Facebook with their individualized front pages is not.
> It's a legal issue in regards to section 230 which only protects open platforms from liability from user content. If Twitter whats to be a publisher with editorial authority then they should be held to the same standard as NYT and CNN.
Nope. User-generated content can be moderated and Section 230 protections still apply:
> With that done, we can discuss the various ways you might have been wrong about Section 230. If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher" […]
I'm curious: what's the line between Terms of Service and editorial authority?
I don't know the exact wording of section 230. Even if I knew it, it wouldn't help, because I'm not a lawyer.
That's why I don't understand where the line is drawn and why. If the idea is to "protect open platforms from liability from user content", why is it okay to have policies that remove child porn, but not those that remove incitement to hate crimes?
> I'm curious: what's the line between Terms of Service and editorial authority?
IANAL: prior approval prior to posting.
If an employee of the publisher is in the 'chain of command' and hits a "Publish" or "Approved" button in the CMS, then it is editorial authority.
If any random yahoo can post something without moderation beforehand, then it is user generated. But the CMS operator could then remove the content after the fact per ToS.
> they should be held to the same standard as NYT and CNN.
There still are significant distinctions. NYT and CNN have a much smaller number of people publishing news, who are hired and paid for their work. Twitter is just a host with a block button. For example Twitter doesn't have a sign-up hiring interview so anyone could have an account. Another distinction is that Twitter is publish first, ban later while newspapers are filtering before publishing.
Demanding a rule that works for few people to scale to hundreds of millions is wishful thinking. It's a different situation requiring different treatment.
> censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
Why do you conflate any discussion of censorship and freedom of speech with the First Amendment of the US’s constitution?
The folks that are pro-private company censorship always do that. It's the only way their argument works so they have to avoid the nuance that free speech has a law and a principle.
It's constant to read opinions like that in threads like this. We used to have this argument in the 60s where private businesses argued they didn't have to serve blacks since they were a private business. Political speech/activity is protected when it comes to labor law. It's not hard to see the law updated at some figure point. Discrimination is discrimination in my book, and free speech is paramount even the most repugnant opinions.
Twitter suspending/banning for violations of policy is discrimination in the same way barkeeps throwing unruly patrons out of the bar is discrimination.
Depends on the policy. Obviously harassing or obscene speech is one thing and even the government is free to restrict it in certain ways (eg. you're not allowed to scream obscenities in public.) Viewpoint-based discrimination is given much more scrutiny, however, and there's a good argument that that's what Twitter et. al are engaging in. Which is less like "throwing unruly patrons out" and more like "calling people whose ideas you dislike unruly and then throwing them out", which is obviously discriminatory.
Only if the barkeep walks past a hundred other patrons at least as unruly as that one patron is, and the barkeep's history suggest he's spending most of his time focusing on the unruly patrons that he disagrees with politically. All while his policies and public statements claim otherwise.
So then I guess McCarthyism was completely ok. Why would Hollywood be compelled to hire leftist sympathisers, and let then disseminate their ideas through their productions.
This was the right move by Twitter at the right time.
If they had blocked his account years, or even months ago, they would have had maintained no credibility as a platform, in the pocket of the left, etc.
If they don't take a stand now, they're all but complicit in perpetuating this [riot? attempted coup? insurrection?]
That said, people should be careful what they wish for: we don't want a couple of powerful media platforms deciding which speech is considered permissible and which isn't. They have to be very conservative in their approach or these platforms will cease to carry any authority.
Do we want Twitter (or Facebook, or whatever) to "carry any authority"?
Nobody in US politics has benefited more from Twitter and Facebook than Trump himself. Anything that makes us stop relying on those as sources of fact or reasoned political discussion sounds like it has a high chance of being a good thing to me.
Twitter gets a lot of their value from all sorts of official accounts, many of which are government agencies. E.g. the last time I applied for a passport, Twitter was the only support channel available (they had a "live chat" page on their website as well, but it was broken). That's not right - what if I'd been subject to one of Twitter's arbitrary bans?
Is there a requirement to only use platforms that are available to all citizens? I imagine people can be blacklisted by ISPs and/or mobile carriers. Even a landline contract is not guaranteed, right? What they can't do is turn people away at various offices.
That said, I agree this kind of selective platform favoritism is (currently very minimally, but still) discriminatory. For example some people might not want to use Twitter for ideological reasons. (Let's say because it's a fucking cesspool that just generates tension.)
I've said it in another comment, this is a very dangerous move by Twitter. The next Trump (and there probably will be a next Trump) will know from the very beginning in his mandate to neutralise companies like Twitter.
If you mean by removing section 230, then wouldn't that just make everything much worse?
When reading up about it, it seems like websites like twitter would have to either completely remove all types of moderation or get strict enough moderation that user comments would be unfeasible to allow.
I don't see how that would accomplish anything but remove the social media sector from USA.
Although I have yet to hear anyone's theory on what it could be replaced with.
No, I think the next Trump will do what Putin did with VKontakte and will take the company directly from the owners' hands (there are numerous ways to do that even in a Western democracy, the hostile takeover has practically been invented in the US). Of course he (most probably will be a "he") won't do that directly, one of his business friends will help. Things like "removing section 230" are just syntactic sugar that keep us programmers/geeks busy by barking at the wrong tree.
Twitter banned him just after he told protestors to go home. His message of deescalation will not reach them, instead they will see he is banned and be further riled up. This is a very dangerous game twitter is playing.
Your timeline is wrong. The hiding of the tweets and the account lockdown happened after the police had already begun to re-take the Capitol; I want to say several hours later.
Maybe they could gather the media into one room in the White House and tell them all the things the President wants them to know. I bet reporters would show up every day to something like that.
I'm sure he does want that but he's not entitled to it. If he wants to use Twitter he should follow the same ToS as everyone else. If he doesn't like them he can use something else.
There's nothing about that that message that was a message of de-escalation. He literally told the insurrectionists that he loved them and that the election was a fraud.
Twitter left up the message telling people to go home, and took down the tweets saying they were special people doing important work, that the election was actually a landslide victory for him, and was being stolen.
Message of de-escalation? Did you watch the video? One moment he says to go home, the next he says the election was stolen in an unprecedented action against him.
At best it's a mixed message. If you're telling people that the election is actively being stolen, what are your expectations for their response exactly? That they say "aw shucks" and go home?
> If you're telling people that the election is actively being stolen, what are your expectations for their response exactly?
So the 4 years that Democrats said the election was stolen, and they illegally stormed the US Capitol at the Kavanaugh hearings, what should we have thought of that?
Basically every organization and politician on the left was supporting that and there was no Twitter censorship.
It's totally legitimate to say "I hate Trump and want to see him go", but it's impossible to stand on principle and say "Hey, Stacy Abrams is really in the right to say that her election was fraudulent forever" but Trump can't say the same.
It puts Twitter in the position of legitimizing certain claims of fraud and discounting others in national elections. That's frightening, and people supporting this should think what an alternate world would look like where billions of people were on Parler and not Twitter.
> Basically every organization and politician on the left was supporting that
not the left. Lots of D politicians, granted. But I can't believe you seriously think that the "the election was fraudulent theatrics" (which I'll take for granted as theatrics, though a more careful treatment is warranted) of D politicians and e.g. Rachel Maddow could ever have had the same effect as these theatrics from Trump and co, which call for armed citizens to take action.
And the citizens weren't armed. The people killed were the unarmed protestors, by the police.
We can imagine what would happen if they had a certain skin color and were protesting a different event. It isn't the reaction that would happen today.
I've seen people on social media in the past few weeks talking about bringing weapons to DC for what happened earlier today. Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested a couple days ago in DC while carrying high capacity magazines [0]. A lot of pictures I've seen of people in the capital building today show them carrying heavy duty zip ties. Why did they have these? Were they planning on taking prisoners/hostages?
We've also seen the reaction to other protests in DC in the last few years. The police response today was much smaller than other recent protests.
Donald Trump's response to statues being torn down was to push for long sentences for people damaging federal property [1]. Has he also pushed for long sentences for people trespassing in the capital buildings and damaging them?
Hillary Clinton conceded immediately, and the Democratic party did not launch a wave of legal challenges to the election results. The argument that the extreme Russiagate types were making was that Russian agents and bots on social media had convinced people to vote for Trump. There were none of these unbelievably absurd claims about manufactured ballots etc.
” Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.”
I would "object" to Trump doing so in the sense that I would judge it to be the rationalizing behaviour of an egomaniac. Which is exactly my reaction to the linked statements by Hillary Clinton.
It is still absurd to act like there is an equivalence between her claiming that Russian interference misled voters into choosing the "wrong" candidate, vs. Trump (a) claiming that ballots were manufactured, altered or tampered with and that actual voting infrastructure and processes are corrupt, (b) having his legal team launch a bunch of frivolous lawsuits in various states, and (c) pressuring the secretary of state of an electorally-close state to overturn election results.
Clinton's statements, as overblown as they may have been, were just an accusation of unfairness, not calling for the results to be overturned and the loser installed in office. All of the #resistance rhetoric was about the need to defeat Trump through the electoral process, or through parliamentary procedures (based on his actions after taking office). Again, there is a fundamental difference between claiming that voters were lied to, and claiming that the government itself directly interfered in the voting process without ANY remotely credible evidence to back that claim.
Trying to equate the two situations because they both involved the use of the word "illegitimate" is beyond laughable.
One is a coordinated scheme to influence impressionable voters backed by evidence. The other is a claim of election fraud with zero evidence. Not the same thing.
If Trump claimed the election was stolen in 2022, nobody would accuse him of a coup attempt that needs freedoms curtailed. The treatment is different because the intention is different, Clinton was throwing mud while Trump seems to want to stay in power.
These are all things Trump actually says, ad verbatim, and has been repeating this for the better part of a year. If these things were true then violence would be a logical, reasonable, justified, and appropriate response to stop a hostile anti-democratic takeover of the country.
Of course, nothing of Trump's claims are true. Not even remotely. Not even a tiny kernel of truth in it.
But you just can't expect people who actually hold this worldview to quietly stay at home. I wouldn't, if this would actually be happening.
As I've said many times before, if the current path continues it's only a matter of time before there is actual real bloodshed, and Trump and his bootlickers can't just wash their hands with "but I said I they had to remain calm!"
And if you look at the cause for all of this ... it's not even a political disagreement really, it's just Trump not being mature enough to accept that a universe exists where he could lose an election. Good heavens all this ruckus for something so petty. Future historians will look back to Trump not too dissimilar to how we look back to Caligula.
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!
I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!
Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!
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.
Why is it that every time Donald Trump makes a statement like this, there are always large numbers of his supporters who believe he's still encouraging their bad behavior? I'd say he either knows what he's doing or his communication skills are dangerously bad for a politician. Am I missing a third option?
The President often communicates via Twitter. Not sure where you'd get non verbal communication, like body language, in those cases. For the rest, do you believe he is aware of this and doing it intentionally or is he subconsciously revealing his real beliefs and intentions?
Not BLM/Antifa but Lijian Zhao (Chinese diplomat) posted a doctored image of a soldier holding a knife to a child’s throat with the message: “Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers. We strongly condemn such acts, &call for holding them accountable.” (https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1333214766806888448). Twitter didn’t even bother to post a disclaimer (like they do with Trump’s tweets) and ignored the request of Australia’s PM to delete the tweet.
An image that is obviously not a photo. The dude is literally standing on a large puzzle board. It's a reference to something that actually happened, and clear it's not an actual photo... Should political cartoons also be removed in your opinion?
I don’t think it’s obvious at all, especially when you view it on a mobile. You can also see the words Morrison used to describe the post: “truly repugnant, deeply offensive, utterly outrageous. The Chinese government should be totally ashamed of this post. It diminishes them in the world’s eyes. It is a false image and a terrible slur on our defense forces.”
As for whether the post should be removed.. well, I’m personally against censorship, but if you’re going to remove Trump’s posts then I similarly think this post ought to be removed as well.
The current bar is someone fanning the flames but then gives a concessionary call for peace. It should be easier to find than people explicitly instigating violence.
I am not sure what’s the point of this snarky comment. Are you implying that antifa and similar so-called far-left movements are incapable of organizing?
This seems evidently false. Some examples of such organizations are By Any Means Necessary and Refuse Fascism. Both are formed by various anarchists, Trotskyists and other radical (in the sense of wanting to radically change the current organization of society) leftists. Both fight against Trump administration and for LBTGQA+ rights and various forms of socialism.
Twitter explicitly permitted tweets from Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denying the holocaust and calling for the destruction of Israel. Jack Dorsey was asked about this in front of the Senate. [1] He had some hair-splitting, legalistic reason why Khamenei calling for Israel's destruction is not "incitement of violence" but some of Trump's tweets are.
The message they removed for violating their rules stated-- after repeating the stolen election blather that he's been spinning for the last month--:
"We have to have peace. We have to have law and order we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anybody hurt. [...] We have to have peace. So go home, we love you, you're very special, you've seen what happens you've seen the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.
Knowing this, do you believe that it was still the right move to suspend his account over this particular video rather any of hundreds of prior cases or-- no doubt-- the hundreds of opportunities which would arise in the coming months?
Trump being on Twitter is good for business. Everyday is another car crash and they’re the news station.
Trump lost so the best way to maximize attention/profit is to shake things up on Trump’s way out. Ie start applying the rules to him with enough time for him to react to it before the end of his presidency. This seems like a highly calculated move with only one motive, and it isn’t the good of the people.
Facebook, Twitter,Reddit and the classic media where the key enabling factor to Trump. They reward the most brash, most outspoken statements - which quickly became the most hateful and partisan.
They need to do a lot more then this.
(And that cuts both ways, daily there is anti-religious hatred on reddit's front page, or covid quacks on twitter). Falsehoods get more clicks then the truth, and they have been ridding that.
I recently noticed that about reddit. I thought it was just a time wasting site with a political bias. But actually it is a site for spreading false information. Maybe it doesn't get called out often because it's a bit smaller than FB. But for its 50M+ DAU, I presume that false information must be harmful.
I always thought it was obvious they were going to ban him after his time in office was up, it's hard to imagine anything else happening with how they feel about each other.
This is unconscionable and monstrous for Twitter. If the President wanted to call for peace -- now he cannot. If the President wanted to send a message of humility and introspection -- he is unable to. If the President wanted to bring us together during these trying times -- we have shut the door. His last message was a message of love, and some of us were too blind to see it for what it truly is.
And if the President wanted to escalate? Like he has been doing for 2 months now?
Also, he's currently the president of the united states. Was the president of the united states completely unable to communicate with the country before twitter?
I think a lot of posts on HN are purposefully contradictory or otherwise "not getting it" simply to generate discussion and make sure many sides of a topic are discussed.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1346970432017031178
Edit: nobody has an answer? It seems a very important question. Like if you say “spreading fake news”, you are saying Twitter should act as an authority of truth. Since they can’t possibly be that, where does that leave us?
However, it's a private site & they don't need to justify their giving service or not.
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469127807005777...
It is a fact that that this election is over, and Biden won fair and square. 60 losses in State and Federal courts proves that. And yet Trump continues to incite his supporters by spreading falsehoods - the election was stolen, the other side committed fraud, patriots need to #stopthesteal and so on. Even yesterday he promised never to concede.
But sure, selectively look at the text where says “remain peaceful”. What a joke people like you are.
------
>Be There. Will Be Wild!
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a supporter misspelled the word “cavalry” in tweeting that “The calvary is coming, Mr. President!”
Mr. Trump responded: “A great honor!”
------
But first came the remarks of the President, delivered on the Ellipse, just south of the White House.
“We will never give up,” he said. “We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s death involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”
The USA could be a dictatorship if Trump were just slightly smarter.
The only reason they’re acting now is that their excuse is about to expire. If they found another good excuse, Trump would stay.
What’s happening this week isn’t new, it’s been happening for years.
He will probably not leave politics entirely, though. That would mean being forced to admit that he lost which is beyond his ego.
That’s true in the sense that Twitter’s rules change specifically motivated by Trump’s violation of their pre-existing rules applied globally, not just in the US, and enabled and was seized on by similarly-oriented leaders elsewhere, as well.
Those laws are a mistake, because sooner or later, you elect a man who revels in being above the law, and who will act accordingly. Yesterday, such a man started a coup, in order to retain power. A few days before that, he was committing election fraud in Georgia. These are serious crimes, the consequences of which he is shielded from.
It's just a modern version of the divine right of kings.
These laws exist for a reason. And just because Trump is Trump doesn't mean it doesn't work well most of the time. Remember this is the same man chanting "lock her up" and promised to change libel laws so he could sue everyone and their mother. Do you think he wouldn't have gone after elected officials with lawsuits?
And for most countries these laws are very far from absolute, and/or come with escape hatches.
If you are a DA, yes. Private citizens can't file criminal charges. A judge would throw your case out, and you'd probably be disbarred, though. Those are the checks and balances inside our legal system.
If you can't see the difference between POTUS committing a clearly defined crime (Say, election fraud... Or sedition.) and the legal 'theories' of the sovereign citizen movement, I don't know what to say.
> Or charge MPs for libel or slander for saying their opinion about something?
1. You can already do that. Libel and slander are civil cases, and you can sue anyone you want in civil court, for any reason whatsoever, including POTUS.
2. If the courts find it to actually be libel or slander, why the hell not? If an elected official knowingly spreads lies and falsehoods that cause you material harm, you should be entitled to restitution.
> These laws exist for a reason.
Yes, elected officials passed them to protect themselves from legal consequences for their actions.
> And just because Trump is Trump doesn't mean it doesn't work well most of the time.
No, it doesn't work well most of the time. There's a very clear lack of equality under the law in this country - with the executive, its minions, and its friends being very clearly above the law.
> Remember this is the same man chanting "lock her up" and promised to change libel laws so he could sue everyone and their mother.
So, hold on, let's break this down.
We currently have laws that protect the executive from criminal prosecution.
This protection, at the moment, only applies to the current executive, not someone who might become part of the executive in the future.
And you are concerned that weakening these laws will let the current executive attack their future opposition.
... That doesn't make a lick of sense. Prior to getting elected, Trump had no power to 'lock her up'. After Trump got elected, Hillary was no longer protected, because she was not part of the executive.
How exactly is making the sitting president immune to criminal prosecution protect their political opponents from his vindictive behaviour? If anything, it empowers his vindictive behaviour. He is using these laws to protect himself, as he attack his opposition, and prevents a peaceful transfer of power.
And yes, I'm aware that impeachment exists. The impeachment process is a kangaroo court, the impartiality of which would make a Soviet judge blush.
I'm not really interested about a conversation about various details; especially not if your response is just a flat unnuanced "elected officials passed them to protect themselves from legal consequences". I'm not even talking about the US specifically. The world is larger than the US, and the US doesn't even have MPs. I don't even know the specifics of the US laws on this.
The official Twitter account of the POTUS is @POTUS, not @realdonaldtrump.
(1) https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/worldlead...
The smart move is to bide their time slowly backing him down without angering him until January 20th when he no longer has any power to use any lever of power.
A furious Trump issuing a blanket pardon to anyone on Parler after being kicked off twitter could be a real result.
EDIT: What I specifically doubt is that Trump can just write out a pardon for "anyone on Parler". Doesn't it have to be a pardon for someone specific? Or can it be as generic and vague as he wants?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNZc9H54eBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx4FD6xtLJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMiOMNIRs3k
TLDR: He can pardon any federal offense.
President Carter pardons draft dodgers
On January 21, 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter grants an unconditional pardon to hundreds of thousands of men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War.
In total, some 100,000 young Americans went abroad in the late 1960s and early 70s to avoid serving in the war. Ninety percent went to Canada, where after some initial controversy they were eventually welcomed as immigrants. Still others hid inside the United States. In addition to those who avoided the draft, a relatively small number–about 1,000–of deserters from the U.S. armed forces also headed to Canada. While the Canadian government technically reserved the right to prosecute deserters, in practice they left them alone, even instructing border guards not to ask too many questions.
<https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/president-carter...>
(Not an endorsement of a mass pardon of all Parler members.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon
But the Carter case does address the circumstance of pardoning a large (and arguably unknowably large) class.
Carter pardoned anyone/everyone who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_4483
But I suppose that might be unfamiliar to American readers as they did not enter the war at the beginning, and "Peace for our time" was invoked in a different context by JFK.
Plus every decade IIRC a lesser-known populist gets locked up for inciting a riot that never even occurred.
What else could be more appropriate.
I should have put a question mark at the end of my message.
Never was good at grammar to begin with.
I don't know if it's the Democrats or Republicans who are less trustworthy from one day to the next.
Wouldn't want to buy a used car from any one of 'em. Even worse a new car.
Anyway, if Hillary Clinton did something treasonous enough to get locked up it would have happened.
For how long who knows, but what would be equal protection under the law for US citizens to be protected from those who would threaten the sanctity of the US Democracy, especially from a position of power when that position is intended to preseve the work of all those who have come before and served without any doubt of their good intentions for all constituents?
So I'm very, very sorry.
I was completely wrong and I admit it fully.
Nobody's fault but mine.
He was fired two months ago.
. EDIT: almost left off a question mark again.
If a person cannot tweet they can still blog, newsletter, email, and even whisper their truth via their free speech to the next person all they like.
Private companies can censor. Censorship isn't the sole domain of the government.
Twitter is censoring the President on its platform. As is their right to do so as Twitter is not the government. At least the last time I checked.
If he always and at all times has unfettered access to a rabid following, there is no moderation, no mediation, and we get our current situation.
Media can and has refused to publish his BS
The media has regularly ignored presidential press conferences they didn't care about for decades now. Bush, Obama, and Trump all had many press conferences that received minimal coverage. In that light, it's no surprise that a President would seek our a more direct line of communication.
- Press releases
- Holding a news conference
- For emergencies, IPAWS
Twitter not carrying his messages is akin to CNN choosing not to broadcast his rallies. It's not censorship.
People on a medium tend to overstate that media’s influence. Newspapers routinely refuse to print politicians’ op eds. Twitter is more pervasive, but it’s far from universal. As long as it’s not fiddled with around elections, de-platforming is fine.
The President does have certain abilities to commandeer media time, but that would require making an official address.
The President is inciting violence by spreading dangerous misinformation and not condemning domestic terrorists.
Our sacred democratic institutions and world standing have taken a big hit. And, even worse - American lives were lost today due to this rhetoric.
We can't continue acting like this is a matter of hurr durr censorship anymore. It's time to move past idealism and into reality: people are in danger. Words have consequences.
We saw today what happens when people with immense power spout extremist ideology for years without consequence.
Let today's action by Twitter be part of the consequence. It's not censorship: it's consequence. Trump will not be arrested or chased for his rhetoric. He simply won't be able to spout it to the masses on a privately owned platform.
A life was lost today. There should be some consequence.
I'm curious what you've been reading or watching that led you to believe that's likely
Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform
And incitement of violence has never been protected speech. This has gone too far.
> censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
Nothing here says it's only censorship if done by the government. Legally in the USA there's a stark distinction between government & non-governmental censorship. Even then sometimes private entities fall under restrictions like in the case of the FCC & public broadcast networks (see Janet Jackson nip slip, the inability to curse during certain TV/radio programs at certain times, etc). Now whether all of this desirable or not is politically debatable & one we should have. That being said under the current legal structure Twitter is probably in the clear.
I'm generally more curious how these kinds of actions by tech companies don't violate section 230 though. In the early days of the WWW, that was the reason given for not moderating such speech - "if we start moderating any speech then we're not a safe harbor and we have to moderate all speech". Does this mean that these tech companies that are doing moderation expose themselves legally somehow? Or does it just mean that the previous arguments were done in bad faith? Or were there laws passed to refine section 230 in this regard?
Oxford English Dictionary definition:
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/censorship
Nothing mentioned about the government at all.
But did you follow your link? It says noun.
Trump is still free to say whatever he likes, and Twitter is still free to moderate its platform.
Do you? Really? Seems like everything would just be a spam-and-troll-filled wasteland...
There's nothing that prevents the President from being one of those trolls, and there's no strong reason for any given platform to give him special treatment forever if he persists in that behavior...
(Which is good, just like having a bouncer at a bar - punching someone in the face may be someone's genuine behavior, but it's not very welcome.)
You're very eager to weaken the private property rights of others, as well as to give a LOT of power to the government (legality as the only consideration) and I don't think these thing would work out for you like you hope.
You can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
You can write any book you want - but no one is under any obligation to publish it for you.
I think it's shocking how Twitter has completely changed course from its "free speech wing of the free speech party" positioning, and I understand why people find it frustrating that you don't have to "choose between being a platform and a publisher". But you don't; that's not the law and it hasn't been the law for over a quarter-century. And that rule has mostly been a very good thing for online speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...
Is the Post Office under an obligation to mail your book to your subscriber list?
No one is asking Twitter to put his messages on their front page, but anything who specifically subscribed should be able to see anything he writes.
No one is asking Twitter to break the law, nor host illegal content of any kind.
More broadly, Twitter is not obligated to keep tweets up from anyone to anyone. It would be rather silly if, for example, all tweets from north america got deleted and people got up in arms accusing it of "censorship" (in a hypothetical scenario where unbeknownst to them, there was a catastrophic infrastructure failure).
From Oxford dictionary: "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."
Silicon valley has done a lot of harm over the last few years, and redefining words to mean things that benefit big tech companies is one of the worst things they have done.
The first ammendment only applies to the government, however the government is not the only institution capable of censorship.
Censorship doesn’t only occur by violation of the first amendment.
Unreasonable: Running into them full force, leaning your shoulder into their jaw and breaking it into three pieces
The line: somewhere in between
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you really did miss my point:
Twitter controls access to a very large audience, only rivalled maybe by Facebook. If you get banned from Twitter, you can't easily go and use a competitor. If there were tens or hundreds of Twitters in the world, then yeah, the "being thrown out of a bar" analogy would hold.
I saved and linked the video in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668883
While I have zero support for Trump supporters, aren't these websites protected by the government with Section 230? This isn't a right granted to these platforms by the constitution either, the fact that these social media are basically shielded from any civil responsibility when it comes user generated content, in fact that what made them thrive at scale... I'm just saying.
I'm sure that it is. [0]
> The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
[0] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/censorship
Enough of the Doublespeak. It’s censorship, albeit by a private entity. When it inevitably happens to the left, I’ll call it censorship then too and I’ll advocate against it.
https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-vi...
> 93% of Black Lives Matter protests have been peaceful
Does not contradict jimbob45's point that "BLM [...] incited a great deal of violence this summer"
Going by the numbers in your URL, 7750 demonstations of which 7% violent = 542 violent demonstrations.
I thought HN discussions were based on facts rather than political biases.
I very much hope they are.
Difference is, if doesn't fit their narrative it is not covered.
It's ok in the sense that they have every legal right to do so. It would lose them a ton of goodwill though, so they probably wouldn't do it. That's the free market at work.
We have an established democratic process to censure (not censor) and if necessary, remove from office elected officials. That is the appropriate venue and the appropriate authority to deal with this, not Twitter.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is important, but not so much because it’s the only way for governments to communicate effectively with citizens. That’s absurd.
Government has long had the power to commandeer broadcast media when it needs to get a message to the people ("We interrupt this broadcast...") Do we want to do away with that?
For all its flaws, the government is still something every citizen of the US has a say in, however small. I'm not willing to trade that for rule by Twitter executives, however well-intentioned they might be at the present moment.
No, it hasn’t (outside of, say, the Emergency Alert System.) Government addresses (“We interrupt this broadcast…”) are a subject of requests for air time, which broadcast networks usually (but not always) grant.
A decent enough basic explanation with some historical examples is here: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/major-networks-carry...
Generally, yes, I want private entities to decide whether or not to relay government messages. (The government should have its own facilities for basic necessary operational communication via the post, common carrier phone systems, etc., of course.)
The alternative is to surrender freedom of speech in favor of government direction of media.
There’s a very narrow space of cases where, with appropriate procedural safeguards, which start with legislation determining the need and setting the conditions of use, the government ought to be able to direct messages over private infrastructure that isn’t common-carrier; that role is pretty much covered by the Emergency Alert System [0] in the US.
[0] https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/practitioners/integr...
Delivering government messages does not preclude you from also delivering contradictory messages from others. Freedom of speech would involve delivering all messages, not just the ones you like. Requirement to deliver messages != direction of the media.
No, my freedom of speech and the press means I don’t relay speech or use my press to reproduce messages I don’t think deserve to be relayed.
That’s pretty well established to be the meaning of that freedom.
> Requirement to deliver messages != direction of the media.
Yes, the state mandating that I use my resources (such as a printing press, or its digital analog) to reproduce and disseminate messages I disagree with relaying is direction of the media and (outside the usual strict scrutiny terms for restrictions on essential liberty) a violation of my First Amendment rights.
1) The content of calls is not pushed to a dashboard mixed in with things you want to hear algorithmically. This core discovery feature of Twitter means that the content of the messages from people you are not subscribed to must meet some basic criteria of acceptability, or no one would use it.
2) We had common-carrier status applied to ISPs for a few short years before Ajit Pai got that rolled back for Verizon. You might have been able to extend that logic to Twitter and then I could see that as a fair comparison if that was how they were operating. But Twitter would never acquiesce to such an onerous mandate and would lobby hard against it.
If "This is a message from the President of the United States" does not meet the criteria of being something that a user might want to hear, what the hell does? And if the President is saying something completely insane then it's even more important that the people can hear exactly what he says! What would you prefer - you hear the President say an insane thing and you can say "yep, that guy is insane we need to get rid of him" or Twitter tells you "look, uh, just trust us this guy is insane, don't listen to him". In the second scenario, Twitter has all the power, and makes all the decisions about who gets to be an elected official, not you.
> We had common-carrier status applied to ISPs for a few short years before Ajit Pai got that rolled back for Verizon. You might have been able to extend that logic to Twitter and then I could see that as a fair comparison if that was how they were operating. But Twitter would never acquiesce to such an onerous mandate and would lobby hard against it.
"That's not currently how it is" and "Twitter wouldn't like it" don't strike me as particularly good reasons for not having a neutral carrier that accurately tells people the things their elected officials say.
If they changed their business practices to the model used by other network service providers commonly afforded neutral carrier status (i.e. SaaS, ISPs), then I think there might be a case for your second point.
Twitter is a publisher except for purposes of civil liability, and that only because Section 230 specifically, in an effort to promote largely automated, highly scalable, actively curated publication online, specifically exempts them and other similar online publishers from the liability treatment otherwise applicable to publishers.
Why would freedom of speech involve delivering all messages to you, including the ones you don't want? What a strange concept of freedom that involves ceding control to others.
no and luckily for you it cannot, because if the President of the US wants to speak on public matters he can do so through the White House press room.
However Donald J Trump, despite the fact that he thinks he is somehow synonymous with "The United States government", which he is not, can be thrown off any private platform that deems that necessary. Some people might have forgotten it over the last four years, but Donald Trump and his personal twitter account, and the office of the presidency, are not the same thing.
The US govt doesn't need Twitter to communicate with its citizens.
The fact that there was hate speech by a user, in this case the President, means that Twitter acted in support of its broader platform. It has no obligation to the President or to support his preferred communication platform for hate speech.
I don’t think the state has the Constitutional power to compel private parties to relay what officials say outside of exceptional cases, because of freedom of speech and the press.
The right to hear isn’t the right to commandeer others resources to have it relayed to your hearing.
One of those should be to refrain from using their power as a transmitter of information to manipulate the relationship between the people and their government. Maybe here, they have some noble purpose, do we trust that in the future they always will? Maybe in the future they would delete the accounts of Senators who call for antitrust investigations into Twitter. Who knows? Once they have the power, do you trust them to use it only for things you agree with?
A right to hear without any mechanism to enforce it is pointless.
We place reasonable restrictions on companies that serve the general public to ensure they treat all members of the public fairly. You can't decide not to serve certain customers because you don't like their skin color or religion, for example. Another reasonable requirement for a communications company would be that they accurately relay the communications that their users send, without interfering with or manipulating them to serve the company's own purposes.
This is like the Post Office deciding not to deliver mail.
> And incitement of violence has never been protected speech.
I saw an incitement to protest, but I saw nothing encouraging violence. Do you have an links to anything like that?
Twitter isn’t a government corporation with a legally-mandatory monopoly, so, no, its more like me choosing not to pass on something I got from a politician a disagree with.
If freedom of speech and the press is curtailed precisely because the speaker or publisher has a large audience so the curtailment most efficiently gives government control of messaging, that doesn’t make it better.
Because, like a newspaper, they provide an actively curated compilation of information received from a variety of contracted sources to readers. Sure, much (but not all) of the curation is algorithmic, and the direct sources are mostly not under employment contract and not getting paid money for the content (either providing it for free or paying money for reach), while for most newspapers many of the direct sources would be under employment contract and they and others would be getting paid money for the input they provide into the curated product, but that difference doesn't seem particularly relevant to whether Twitter is a publisher. And, yes, a lot of the algorithmic curation is driven by explicit reader expression of preference, and some of the rest is driven by inferred reader preference from reader behavior. But that the curated product is highly personalized also doesn't seem relevant to how free expression rights apply to curation choices.
For purposes of civil liability, Twitter is not a “publisher” solely because of Section 230, but since we are discussing how the Constitution applies to them (which Congress could not change by statute) not how civil liability applies to them, that's not relevant.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/part-IV/chapter-3...
As it happens I wrote an essay on this yesterday: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/google-censors-talkradio , in response to an other act of corporate censorship.
My argument was that because of network effects there are only a few dominant platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and that when these platforms take down content, they are in practise preventing that person's message from getting out, i.e. censoring people.
This gives them a lot of power: power to decide which ideas can be disseminated, power to decide which politicians can get elected. So if you favour democracy, you have to be against the power of big tech platforms to shut down discussions they don't like.
(My favoured solution would involve mandate interoperability using ActivityPub and similar protocols, which breaks the dominance of big platforms due to network effects).
I'm not sure that a communications network passing on their users' communications would amount to treason.
But let's run with that for instance, and assume it did, in law.
> Do they have a right to demur?
Clearly if a course of action is against the law, they have a legal obligation not to do it. True by definition.
As to whether they have a moral obligation, that's another question entirely, and a rather complex one, as one would have to define what is moral. I would say that a company that wishes to continue operating in a country is going to have to obey the laws of that country.
> Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in?
Well, that all depends on whether transmitting other people's messages constitutes a crime. Realistically, no company is going to do things that would get it shut down (and if they did, they wouldn't do so for long).
Can you explain what it not being censorship has to do with freedom of speech not being the same thing as entitlement to a platform?
Whatever your position on this issue, it is certainly alarming that on hackernews intellectual arguments over the meaning of a word are sent down the memoryhole.
Doublespeak is really becoming an issue in our society, and a subset of our population is censoring those that point it out.
Were they able to send their message to 10s millions of people instantly and lead them to things? or how long would it take them to reach all those people.
I wonder if today's leaders have a very different power compared to when most of these laws and systems were put in place?
"Our three main forces—the fleet, the workers, and the army units—must be so combined as to occupy without fail and to hold at any cost: (a) the telephone exchange; (b) the telegraph office; (c) the railway stations; (d) and above all, the bridges."
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/08.htm
Charles pissed them off a couple days earlier by trying to hoist onerous censorship so they showed him a middle finger.
Don’t fuck with people who buy ink by the barrel.
In essence there should simply be more printers, so that the King could get someone else to print his pamphlets.
No, definitely not. Some states would have had mechanisms for distributing stuff that the leaders wanted publicised, but it wouldn't generally have been all that common. And, in practice, in many cases, if the leader happened to be insane, the system would suppress it. George III wasn't bothering everyone in Britain with weird rants every few hours, say.
The ability of leaders to harangue the general public whenever they feel like it is, in practice, _very_ new; basically since Twitter became popular.
Edit: It may be fun to downvote and might make some feel great for a period of time, but it doesn't change the fact that the President of the country of free speech is being censored.
This reads as a Slippery slope argument
Apologies if you misunderstood.
You can look up respected legal scholars from Georgetown who came to This conclusion during Clinton’s impeachment
You talk about censorship but would allow Trump to censor Twitter if he got to decide what they publish.
And that would be unconstitutional.
I wonder what the chain of command was who told these cops to essentially do nothing today. Who does the buck stop with?
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes and all that...
2. The SPD, for a reason they still can't explain, and against the orders of both Mayor Durkan, and Police Chief Best, chose to leave the East Precinct, and then, in a petty manner, stopped responding to calls in the entire Capitol Hill area.
3. The CHAZ occupied a public park, and the streets of the surrounding block. It did not stop the operation of businesses, legislatures, or government. It did not prevent the police from accessing the area.
What we're seeing here, is a failed coup - an attempt to prevent the peaceful, democratic transfer of power by force, at the behest of a politician. I can't believe that you can't tell the difference between a coup, and a protest. One is treason and insurrection, which carries the death penalty, while the other is a constitutionally protected right.
"police say violent crowd prevented access to victims"
I'll believe it when its a citation from an impartial third party - a paramedic, a bystander, etc.
The fact is, the police retained access to both the East Precinct, and to CHAZ, through the latter's existence. They would show up in small groups of two or three, and were allowed in.
I do give a small amount of consideration to the sacredness of the capitol, and the additional damage that images of blood spilled on the steps of our capitol would do.
I understand the rationale could still stand, but wanted to point out that their lack of enforcement did not prevent bloodshed entirely.
No transcript yet, but here's the slug:
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/06/954115945/former-defense-secr...
The fact that a large mob of people like this - many of them armed, and some of them planting explosives - breaking into the Capitol, taking things and causing a bunch of damage, results in only a small handful of arrests is pretty crazy, too.
It's crystal clear that the police have no trouble deescalating violent situations when they want to.
If you've followed the history of protest in this country, you'll find it difficult to believe any of these things. From suffragist, to labour, to the civil rights movement, unarmed left-wing protests are routinely brutalized by police. Armed right-wing protests are not.
When someone is brutalized by another human because they don't have a gun, of course that's because people are being evil! How dare you say they made themselves a victim?
And trying to do self defense with a gun is a terrible idea in most circumstances.
(Though trying to fight government abuse with a gun is also a terrible idea.)
Deciding not to carry around a gun is very different from deciding not to defend yourself. It's not victim mentality.
>And trying to do self defense with a gun is a terrible idea in most circumstances.
statistics say otherwise also statistics cant even capture the self defenses that weren't needed because someone had a gun and could have used it if needed.
>(Though trying to fight government abuse with a gun is also a terrible idea.)
trying to fighting against anyone isn't self defense. no where did I say anything the like you just made that up.
>Deciding not to carry around a gun is very different from deciding not to defend yourself. It's not victim mentality. You are seem unable to completely read and understand my post. You cant just pick one part and ignore the rest. I clear said that if you cant defend yourself its not the same as if you voluntary dont want to. There are many valid reasons why you would not carry a gun and so if you dont have one you obliviously cant us it. Not the same as if you want to have guns removed from anyone so people no longer have a choice.
I'm not sure what the 'no' refers to?
Your original post said "the gov or literally anyone". Your second post only talked about the gov part, so I reminded you about the "literally anyone" part. Where's the misinterpretation?
> trying to fighting against anyone isn't self defense. no where did I say anything the like you just made that up.
Let me rephrase. Self defense against the government with a gun is a terrible idea.
> You are seem unable to completely read and understand my post. You cant just pick one part and ignore the rest. I clear said that if you cant defend yourself its not the same as if you voluntary dont want to.
You did say that. You also equated choosing not to carry a gun with choosing not to defend yourself, with the phrases "Who would have thought that people with guns are less likely to be brutalized by the gov or literally anyone." and "their own actions or inactions makes them the victim"
Are you telling me you didn't mean to equate those? If so then your original post was written misleadingly, and I don't even know who you're even accusing of victim mentality anymore.
If you did mean to equate those, then I still think your opinion is hot garbage.
A mob literally broke into the Capitol Building
Even without comparing to BLM, the actions of the people that raided the Capitol should be condemned on their own. There is no need to bring in BLM as a crutch to make the case. It just makes it less weaker than it is.
This is an assault on democracy. We don't need to explicitly cite double standards to make our case. Stop comparing what's going on on the Capitol with BLM protests.
Turns out the violence had nothing to do with it, which was obvious all along of course. But it’s good to know for sure.
We can discuss that in the context of police use/force - not in the context of taking down democracy.
In Bellevue, the police did neither, and instead, talked with the protesters, and there was no looting anywhere near the protest areas.
If you actually cared about minimizing looting, you should probably not attack peaceful protestors on public streets. The chaos that starts is what gives looters cover to operate.
Also as you imply, why would being treated poorly by a public servant (the police) justify the looting of an unrelated private party? It doesn’t. One is not a justified cause for the other.
https://twitter.com/cevansavenger/status/1346920924310867968
Those people are being let past a barrier to where a lot of other people already are. So it doesn't look like they are getting let in to a restricted area.
Maybe we're just seeing the police manage crowd flow.
Without some context I don't see that this shows anything bad happening here.
It's a bit amazing this video is being peddled around HN as evidence of anything; there is so little context.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling
(Not knowing the area/layout/etc. as I said) I just see the latter, with it implied they're about to rush up the steps, but where they go (there or otherwise) unshown.
What is amazing is that everything has been filmed and yet people still disagree with what is being seen .
Unless by the "right word" you meant "how they should be called". But then it becomes a highly subjective question.
Obviously the executive branch police forces were held back. There’s a reason why they are pulling in the New Jersey State Police.
And this killing sure looks like it was part of CHOP: https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/murder-charges-filed-a...
Just kidding. Sounds like a good day to invest in Parler.
Twitter holds the power, but do they not also by definition hold the responsibility of the content on their platform when it costs lives?
> ... noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
I’d be shocked if even this court went so far as to mandate a private company devote its resources to providing content that violates its own rules.
Perhaps grab a mirror and look for some personal responsibility?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
Twitter is not the U.S. government's property.
(Or he could post a message to the White House website.)
Trump can dial up Fox News and be on the air in 10 minutes.
Not what most people would consider "silenced".
On the flip side, if everyone hates you equally you're probably on the right track.
This gives pedophiles the moral high ground.
Twitter is definitely the baddy here, looks like they're giving in to the left wing mob.
Edit: they also suspended Lin Wood https://twitter.com/LLinWood
He's pretty explicitly doing the opposite of trying to calm people down.
The very same people he was winding up a few hours earlier.
I'd say @dang is pretty liked around here! Ups to the great umpire, keep it up. This shit is hard.
I think they would be pretty pissed off to know that they've been banned for months or more because they said something that rubbed the mods the wrong way at one point.
We know, but some of us enjoy reminding Ian Murdock's friends-in-need of what they did.
Preferably before it's their turn to ask for help...
Just flip the showdead switch in settings and you can enjoy the infinite wisdom and feistiness of banned users. Can’t be easier. For instance, in this thread there’s exactly one banned sibling, making a gross, sexual personal attack.
Edit: People downvoting me even though I'm right. Take most of the comments you see on Twitter in subject matter and/or delivery, and they would be either downvoted or moderated off this platform. No-one in good faith (who has had reasonable exposure to Twitter) could argue this is not the case. Just to be clear, I believe this to be a good thing.
Reddit, slashdot, and a whole slew of others went through an HN-like phase of high-quality discussions and content before turning into cesspools.
I think what makes HN unique is benevolent sponsorship. There isn't pressure to grow. It's recruiting for Y-Combinator, which eliminates most of the normal pressures.
* Archived here: http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2009_3_12_33338_3000.html
I have to say from everything I heard about the guy, and my own rare interactions with him, the hatred of him was 100% justified. Some people are just very shitty and lack any sympathizers.
Facebook, Twitter et al. built enormous platforms for speech and thus got caught up in the middle of all cultural and political conflicts on this planet. Not just American election(s), but elections in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Germany, UK, Brazil, plus religious conflicts such as Islamists vs. people who draw Muhammad.
They cannot possibly stay neutral in all those wars at once and when they start taking sides, they will be hated first and then, later, either dismembered or regulated to be a de-facto arm of the government.
This is the false equivalence argument. Some argue that 5g spreads covid. Some argue it doesn’t. You advocate both views and everyone hates you.
Doesn’t make you right.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/30/951095644/even-if-its-bonkers...
so in the end you have to anchor this to some expertise and grounded-in-reality judgement.
For example, the majority in the aforementioned poll believed that COVID-19 was created in a lab in China. And to be honest, an average person really has no way of truly knowing this. They're not virologists or spies. They can only judge based on a gut feeling whether China is/isn't evil, and that is likely based on other things they've heard, which may include rumors, propaganda and Bond movies.
And you could say that this is it, but given the strong polarization and extremism around topics that involve politics it might be a good measure in this case. (Of course, depending on what exactly 'everybody' means.) By definition extremists of either side will see independent actors as hostile. But, of course, this is just a measure, not a proof.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
Afaik, one big issue is that this account was operating under different rules then everybody else. As in, twitter was more permissive with Trump then with other people.
That is not being content neutral. Had it been content neutral, his account would be policed the same way as other peoples years ago.
If he wants to tweet in the official capacity of the President of the United States of America, there is an official Twitter account for that.
Of course, the cynical reason is that Trump's tweets are responsible for a significant percentage of Twitter's "engagement" metrics; I'm sure that internally they have figures that indicate how much revenue they generate from Trump alone.
i do get the diffficult choice Twitter faced, Trump was / is the president. So everything he says is part of the official record. So I guess banning his personal account would ba quite difficult. Twitter, Facebook, YoutTube and so on could have added disclaimers already much earlier, so.
A month from now Trump will not be on Twitter. Nobody will actually see what he allegedly says but he'll be gone.
i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
You're right, no doubt. Though technically all the previous presidents do that. even Michelle Obama is on book tours and such. George W Bush does stuff with Michelle Obama as well.
>i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
True even before potus.
Here's the reality though. The political divide in the USA is at like 30+ year high. It used to be just democrats who divided. Republicans hadnt really changed much over the last several decades.
With platforms like twitter pushing republicans off their platform. It means the echo chamber will be becoming much worse. The political divide just begun for the republicans. The divide will become much larger than it is today because there's even less intermingling.
The joe rogan podcast #1258 with Jack Dorsey and Tim Pool is a pretty good watch. Twitter has extensively banned right-wing personalities off their platform while outright allowing left-wing people break the rules.
For example Twitter recently blocked virtually all negative news about Joe biden and hunter biden during the election. For example in place of blocking the NYpost's coverage of hunter biden's corruption. They banned people to hide the story and then put a counter news article that called it fake news as trending.
Flipside, Twitter allowed Smollet's hate crime hoax. Twitter allows celebrities calling for the death of that maga hat kid. They allowed the russian collusion stuff that turned out to be completely false.
twitter is very biased.
Banning him years ago would be censorship but with clear rules equally applied to all.
Now we are unequal censorship.
Twitter is trending down and will probably not recover but they were going to take a nosedive after Trump left. This gives them political points with the left.
How does outrage lead to more ad revenue? Who wants their brand advertised next to outrage? How many outraged people click on ads?
Trump and any president, on a whim can speak live to all Americans through all cable news channels. He could have called NBC, Fox, CBS, ABC etc to the Oval Office and in 5 minutes be live on basically every channel (including being streamed live on twitter). Instead he choose Twitter.
But yeah, he can always address the press and let the press disseminate his statements, which has its own pros and cons.
The problem with censorship is that ###### and that you cant #####. There is also no way to argue why you agree/disagree with it because #######.
What a wild selective (mis)reading of his Twitter account. Did you miss the parts where he said he loved the people who stormed the Capitol with rifles today? Or the part where he said the vice president should just declare him the winner of the election?
>Did you miss the parts where he said he loved the people who stormed the Capitol with rifles today?
He never said that that that's just total nonsense not even misinterpretation that straight made up BS. You could just as well says he said he loves rapists because it happens to be that at least one of the person at the protest was a convicted rapist. If that's how you interpret things from someone you dont like you have a serious problem with reality.
Hes speech was to the people who attender the protest not specifically to thous who entered the building which obviously where a minority. And even if he included the people who entered the building he did not encourage them in any way to do anything they should not do, in fact if he includes them he too told them to go home peacefully.
That's as clear and unambiguous as it gets.
Some people here despise Facebook for privacy concerns, but it's still a useful private network for family and friends not constrained by the message/length format.
Twitter generates so much negativity, so much strife between people who constantly yell at each other over nothing that socially it is the most toxic place on the internet.
As for public officials using Twitter, a private company for their main communication channel instead of using government websites, they need to stop doing that.
That's a relevant point and I hope every public official would do this. However, what people seem to miss is that Twitter, just like other social media such as Facebook or Instagram, started to, in people's mind, transform into a public agora and lose their private status. The thing is they gained so much power and became so essential and valuable as far as society and political life are concerned that they're now considered as communication channels where everyone, including public officials, should have the right to express their opinion as long as it doesn't break the TOS, which is something I can, in fact, hardly disapprove.
Beef. It's what's for twitter.
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!
https://projects.propublica.org/politwoops/user/realDonaldTr...
"We scored a goal, the umpire didn't see it and they stole our championship away from us. This is a disgrace. Go home in peace"
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
"Censorship" by a private party is a modern extension of the meaning of the term and it is not universally accepted.
And there has been no further news, so the news media moved on to other news, like the siege of the U.S. Capitol building.
No it doesn't. In the U.S., the law is explicitly clear that censorship by the government is subject to strict limitations, but censorship by private parties is part of those parties' exercise of their own rights to free speech. Compelling one person to spread the speech of another person is a form of censorship that censors the former's opposition to the latter's speech.
There are only a handful of cases that compel private parties to tolerate speech they disagree with on their own property (basically, malls), and the scope has been narrowed over time. (See Pruneyard and subsequent cases.)
Things like "private parties", property rights, I'd say that even the idea of "government", come after that fear has been dealt with.
Private property, private rights, and government, have all existed before the "fear" (whatever it is you mean by that) was dealt with.
I'm talking about the basis of the US Constitution, its "spirit", so to speak. My reading of the Federalist Papers is that one of the main reasons-to-be of the Constitution was to avoid tyranny, the men that wrote that thing down put things like respecting private property or even what form of government to use after that. I admit, maybe I'm wrong on that interpretation (I've read them about three years ago), but I've recently started reading a selection of Anti-federalist Papers and I stand by my opinion.
> FB's and Twitter's constitutional rights
Again, there was nothing in the Federalist Papers (nor in the Constitution) about respecting the rights of private, abstract, soulless entities. Yes, I know about the relatively recent decision that gave those corporations a "political soul" (so to speak), but that decision had nothing to do with the original spirit of the basic law on which the USA was founded.
I mean, if conversations on twitter are akin to conversations in a public park in the USA, then you would expect the same social / legal conventions to hold on twitter as in public spaces. If I incited violence in the local park, there are norms and laws that come into play. Arguably the same laws should hold on twitter. From that perspective, its weird that a tech company acts as the judge and jury - rather than the police and the courts. And complaints about censorship make total sense.
But if you think of twitter, google, facebook etc as corporate serfdoms, then there's no problem with twitter's enforcement. Twitter is a space owned and ruled by a tech company. You rent your twitter account, but own nothing. Twitter can set any rules they like, or set no rules and act entirely capriciously. The interesting question is whether or not we want the internet to work like a weird echo of the middle ages. And what (if anything) we should do about it.
EDIT another good take, reversion to feudalism:
„Twitter & Facebook act as
a) De facto spaces of prominent public debate b) De facto news content (press)
De jure, they pretend they're in private tech business (to escape legal responsibility of a +b)“
https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1347155317516365826?s=21
I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the capitalist structure in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives." [1]
-- Wendy Liu
[1] https://medium.com/@dellsystem/dont-put-your-faith-in-uber-7...
Public squares do not have corporate policies. Twitter has never been a public square they've always enforced speech rules from the beginnings.
230 grants platforms both freedom from liability and gives them the ability to moderate. They do not need to pick.
Nope. User-generated content can be moderated and Section 230 protections still apply:
> With that done, we can discuss the various ways you might have been wrong about Section 230. If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher" […]
* https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
I don't know the exact wording of section 230. Even if I knew it, it wouldn't help, because I'm not a lawyer.
That's why I don't understand where the line is drawn and why. If the idea is to "protect open platforms from liability from user content", why is it okay to have policies that remove child porn, but not those that remove incitement to hate crimes?
IANAL: prior approval prior to posting.
If an employee of the publisher is in the 'chain of command' and hits a "Publish" or "Approved" button in the CMS, then it is editorial authority.
If any random yahoo can post something without moderation beforehand, then it is user generated. But the CMS operator could then remove the content after the fact per ToS.
There still are significant distinctions. NYT and CNN have a much smaller number of people publishing news, who are hired and paid for their work. Twitter is just a host with a block button. For example Twitter doesn't have a sign-up hiring interview so anyone could have an account. Another distinction is that Twitter is publish first, ban later while newspapers are filtering before publishing.
Demanding a rule that works for few people to scale to hundreds of millions is wishful thinking. It's a different situation requiring different treatment.
Why do you conflate any discussion of censorship and freedom of speech with the First Amendment of the US’s constitution?
It's constant to read opinions like that in threads like this. We used to have this argument in the 60s where private businesses argued they didn't have to serve blacks since they were a private business. Political speech/activity is protected when it comes to labor law. It's not hard to see the law updated at some figure point. Discrimination is discrimination in my book, and free speech is paramount even the most repugnant opinions.
Is there? Who's making it? Can you give examples?
I mean unless you are logging this and charting it I'm going to assume people are seeing whatever is confirming their priors on this one.
Exactly.
Forcing twitter to quote trump would be coerced speach rather than free speech.
Otherwise, I'm censoring trump right now my not putting his tweet content in this comment, and so are you because you didn't put it in yours
Are you under the impression that the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations is a private entity?
Shortsighted.
If they had blocked his account years, or even months ago, they would have had maintained no credibility as a platform, in the pocket of the left, etc.
If they don't take a stand now, they're all but complicit in perpetuating this [riot? attempted coup? insurrection?]
That said, people should be careful what they wish for: we don't want a couple of powerful media platforms deciding which speech is considered permissible and which isn't. They have to be very conservative in their approach or these platforms will cease to carry any authority.
Nobody in US politics has benefited more from Twitter and Facebook than Trump himself. Anything that makes us stop relying on those as sources of fact or reasoned political discussion sounds like it has a high chance of being a good thing to me.
That authority is given by users basically. And users don't really care about media health.
That said, I agree this kind of selective platform favoritism is (currently very minimally, but still) discriminatory. For example some people might not want to use Twitter for ideological reasons. (Let's say because it's a fucking cesspool that just generates tension.)
When reading up about it, it seems like websites like twitter would have to either completely remove all types of moderation or get strict enough moderation that user comments would be unfeasible to allow.
I don't see how that would accomplish anything but remove the social media sector from USA.
Although I have yet to hear anyone's theory on what it could be replaced with.
No, I think the next Trump will do what Putin did with VKontakte and will take the company directly from the owners' hands (there are numerous ways to do that even in a Western democracy, the hostile takeover has practically been invented in the US). Of course he (most probably will be a "he") won't do that directly, one of his business friends will help. Things like "removing section 230" are just syntactic sugar that keep us programmers/geeks busy by barking at the wrong tree.
Pull the other one. That's not what it was.
We shouldn't act like Twitter is muzzling him during a time of crisis.
Surely, a sitting US president can talk to the public without begging a private company to publish his words.
Um, are television companies not private in the U.S.?
Do you regularly check the White House website?
Would it be appropriate to make ordinary statements on an emergency broadcast?
This is just completely ludicrous. Broadcasting where there are no listeners is useless.
The use of all/any of these things require the cooperation of, or direct services of, private companies.
Even public legal notices, going back the full history of the country, have been published on the pages of privately owned newspapers.
At best it's a mixed message. If you're telling people that the election is actively being stolen, what are your expectations for their response exactly? That they say "aw shucks" and go home?
“Stand down and stand by” is a prime example of this.
So the 4 years that Democrats said the election was stolen, and they illegally stormed the US Capitol at the Kavanaugh hearings, what should we have thought of that?
Basically every organization and politician on the left was supporting that and there was no Twitter censorship.
It's totally legitimate to say "I hate Trump and want to see him go", but it's impossible to stand on principle and say "Hey, Stacy Abrams is really in the right to say that her election was fraudulent forever" but Trump can't say the same.
It puts Twitter in the position of legitimizing certain claims of fraud and discounting others in national elections. That's frightening, and people supporting this should think what an alternate world would look like where billions of people were on Parler and not Twitter.
Yeah, that's kinda how truth and lies work.
not the left. Lots of D politicians, granted. But I can't believe you seriously think that the "the election was fraudulent theatrics" (which I'll take for granted as theatrics, though a more careful treatment is warranted) of D politicians and e.g. Rachel Maddow could ever have had the same effect as these theatrics from Trump and co, which call for armed citizens to take action.
And the citizens weren't armed. The people killed were the unarmed protestors, by the police.
We can imagine what would happen if they had a certain skin color and were protesting a different event. It isn't the reaction that would happen today.
I've seen people on social media in the past few weeks talking about bringing weapons to DC for what happened earlier today. Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested a couple days ago in DC while carrying high capacity magazines [0]. A lot of pictures I've seen of people in the capital building today show them carrying heavy duty zip ties. Why did they have these? Were they planning on taking prisoners/hostages?
We've also seen the reaction to other protests in DC in the last few years. The police response today was much smaller than other recent protests.
Donald Trump's response to statues being torn down was to push for long sentences for people damaging federal property [1]. Has he also pushed for long sentences for people trespassing in the capital buildings and damaging them?
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/4135703001
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thedenverchannel.com/news/a...
This kind of positioning is frustratingly confusing to me. What do you personally gain exactly by saying something so obviously false?
Truly am curious what is forming the foundation of such a position you have?
” Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.”
Sept 2019
It is still absurd to act like there is an equivalence between her claiming that Russian interference misled voters into choosing the "wrong" candidate, vs. Trump (a) claiming that ballots were manufactured, altered or tampered with and that actual voting infrastructure and processes are corrupt, (b) having his legal team launch a bunch of frivolous lawsuits in various states, and (c) pressuring the secretary of state of an electorally-close state to overturn election results.
Clinton's statements, as overblown as they may have been, were just an accusation of unfairness, not calling for the results to be overturned and the loser installed in office. All of the #resistance rhetoric was about the need to defeat Trump through the electoral process, or through parliamentary procedures (based on his actions after taking office). Again, there is a fundamental difference between claiming that voters were lied to, and claiming that the government itself directly interfered in the voting process without ANY remotely credible evidence to back that claim.
Trying to equate the two situations because they both involved the use of the word "illegitimate" is beyond laughable.
That’s not the point.
Clinton claims election is stolen. Uncritical article written.
Trump claims election is stolen? Obvious coup attempt and a need to curtail freedoms.
She conceded hours after polls closed. 2019 likely was not the first time she criticized Trump's legitimacy, but the intention was always different.
You mean ... showed up and were lawfully admitted to hearings, and then were disruptive by yelling? Or do you have something else in mind?
"Democrats stole the election"
"They are the enemy of the people"
etc. etc.
These are all things Trump actually says, ad verbatim, and has been repeating this for the better part of a year. If these things were true then violence would be a logical, reasonable, justified, and appropriate response to stop a hostile anti-democratic takeover of the country.
Of course, nothing of Trump's claims are true. Not even remotely. Not even a tiny kernel of truth in it.
But you just can't expect people who actually hold this worldview to quietly stay at home. I wouldn't, if this would actually be happening.
As I've said many times before, if the current path continues it's only a matter of time before there is actual real bloodshed, and Trump and his bootlickers can't just wash their hands with "but I said I they had to remain calm!"
And if you look at the cause for all of this ... it's not even a political disagreement really, it's just Trump not being mature enough to accept that a universe exists where he could lose an election. Good heavens all this ruckus for something so petty. Future historians will look back to Trump not too dissimilar to how we look back to Caligula.
Putsch
"A secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to overthrow a government"
Though this wasn't so secretly plotted.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/putsch
But he's telling protesters to be peaceful, go home, and calling for respect for the law and law enforcement.
https://www.thetrumparchive.com/:
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!
I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!
Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!
As others have said, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?
That's not a call for order.
Given the large numbers of people involved you can probably find a Tweet that somebody twote that was a policy violation and didn't result in a lock.
What about that?
As for whether the post should be removed.. well, I’m personally against censorship, but if you’re going to remove Trump’s posts then I similarly think this post ought to be removed as well.
This seems evidently false. Some examples of such organizations are By Any Means Necessary and Refuse Fascism. Both are formed by various anarchists, Trotskyists and other radical (in the sense of wanting to radically change the current organization of society) leftists. Both fight against Trump administration and for LBTGQA+ rights and various forms of socialism.
We all know what the real reason is.
[1] https://jewishinsider.com/2020/10/twitter-jack-dorsey-ayatol...
Is there a name for this sort of phrasing where the speaker pussyfoots around the point instead of clearly stating it?
The message they removed for violating their rules stated-- after repeating the stolen election blather that he's been spinning for the last month--:
"We have to have peace. We have to have law and order we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anybody hurt. [...] We have to have peace. So go home, we love you, you're very special, you've seen what happens you've seen the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.
Here is a copy of the full video: https://files.catbox.moe/71gfr1.mp4
Knowing this, do you believe that it was still the right move to suspend his account over this particular video rather any of hundreds of prior cases or-- no doubt-- the hundreds of opportunities which would arise in the coming months?
Trump lost so the best way to maximize attention/profit is to shake things up on Trump’s way out. Ie start applying the rules to him with enough time for him to react to it before the end of his presidency. This seems like a highly calculated move with only one motive, and it isn’t the good of the people.
So just based off of their rules, he should have been banned for good a long time ago.
They need to do a lot more then this.
(And that cuts both ways, daily there is anti-religious hatred on reddit's front page, or covid quacks on twitter). Falsehoods get more clicks then the truth, and they have been ridding that.
Also, he's currently the president of the united states. Was the president of the united states completely unable to communicate with the country before twitter?
It's unfortunate that it may require more effort than just his thumbs, but I'm certain the title he holds at times calls for a bit more.