> German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private tech companies.
This is not about free speech, this is about who holds the power of regulating it.
The first amendment never anticipated the public square to be privately owned. Unfortunately I feel things will have to get much worse before people start listening to the adults in the room again, and enact sensible reforms.
There is a case precedent of a privately owned public space being subject to the First Amendment. Who knows if that would hold up when applied to the internet, something about holding state-level powers... if the platform was declared as a monopoly, would that apply?
When the first amendment was written, the only organized means of widely disseminating information were the government, religious organizations, and private publishers. The last two, of course, were regarded as a vital balance to the first, but (as far as I know) no-one suggested that the freedoms that came to be enumerated in the amendment required these two channels to be compelled to disseminate whatever screed some arbitrary person came up with. The Federalist Papers, for example, were published because the owners of several newspapers chose to do so.
People should have legal rights to contest bans of any kind, plus some controls to make sure you don't lose your private data (e.g. emails, chats) attached to your account when banned.
We don't want to make it expensive to moderate, but false positives should not go unresolved. This tips the balance a bit more in favour of consumers.
People should have legal rights to contest bans of any kind...
Without regulations on "allowed" reasons for bans, or some standard of proof, then a company can just respond to the contest with "Because we wanted to." and then what?
I agree that Trump’s banning from Twitter is concerning, and that he did not incite violence. But that isn’t the underlying issue behind the suspension.
The problem is that a small but very eager group of fanatics have latched on to Trump’s Twitter postings as an excuse to react in violent, deluded ways. It no longer mattered what Trump said, the fanatics would twist its meaning and use it as an excuse for mayhem. (The media clearly have some culpability in this, as they intentionally put out outrageous interpretations in order to whip up controversy. But that’s another issue.)
And so, Twitter felt allowing the situation to continue would not be responsible. They weren’t attempting to silence Trump, but rather to deprive the delusional maniacs of fodder.
> try to find an actual source of President Trump calling for violence on Twitter. Don't believe everything you read.
On 9:53 PM, 28 May 2020 he said:
> ....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!
That phase isn't random and specific connotation[1].
Yet they didn’t suspend him for the specific example provided.
Also, I don’t think it’s so clear that threatening a defensive act could be called “inciting violence”.
If a group of criminals were parading through a neighborhood performing home invasions, I do not think it’d cross the line to warn them off with a public declaration of “our house has guns and we will protect ourselves”.
Most of the time people would look at from a legal or illegal standpoint
Trumps calls for Law and Order, to use legal remedies to clamp down on disorder in society, ethical or not, would not be considered by most a "Call for Violence"
However calls for protestors to "burn it all down" would be a "call for violence"
//for the record I do not think either should be censored, but I am a free speech absolutist so...
