It is interesting how much influence Peter Thiel has on the main players of social media: via Facebook as an early investor and ex-board member and via Twitter with his ex-coworker from Paypal days Musk. He’s very explicit in his book about the power of monopolies and now you see this consolidation of social media companies under a specific group of closed people. WSJ reported Thiel being involved with Musk on this twitter deal, that plus his recent political investments in certain figures, did he figure out that they are not getting the same bang for buck with this ban in play? Dorsey has a financial interest of this deal going through, last I heard was at least 1 billion. So he’ll start saying yes to whatever pops up to let this go through and even more incentive with the recent downturn of tech stocks that are not profitable.
I doubt Thiel is some kind of central master mind behind all this. Musk seems quite independently driven and probably found this a necessary move with only minor chats with thiel (if any). I'm not sure Thiel has any more or less influence than Sam Altman or Paul Graham.
If someone makes you rich and successful with their business advice and you work with them for multiple years, would you ignore their phone call in the future and ignore their other suggestions? It’s not about being a master mind, there is soft power in play, humans are social animals.
Thiel (+ the rest of the board) fired Musk from his CEO position at PayPal.
I'm pretty sure Musk would ignore any phone calls from Thiel.
Furthermore, Thiel didn't make Musk rich. When PayPal was sold to eBay Musk was the single largest shareholder of PayPal, which should tell you who was the most responsible for PayPal's success.
That decision to oust him made Musk (one of the largest shareholders as you mention) rich when ebay purchased paypal under the new CEO… Peter Thiel. He effectively secured an exit for the company.
Wouldn't that be what is beneficial for them to say about each other, in public? I honestly don't know what to think any more about anyone who has obtained massive amounts of money.
You don't need any conspiracies theories to explain why Dorsey is a supporter of free speech.
Dorsey has always been part of the crop of Enlightenment-liberal tech CEOs, which includes Larry, Sergey, and Zuckerberg. It got memory-holed pretty quickly, but these guys were dragged kicking and screaming into the new illiberal consensus that it was their job to decide what users are allowed to talk about. At a certain point, they bowed to the emerging illiberal consensus, for fear of both political and employee-revolt consequences. It is business, after all.
(I was at Google for the first half of the last decade, and it was eerie to see the employee culture slowly get colonized by the culty illiberal-left perspective)
Culture is weird, and can shift dramatically between equilibria. Now that the conversation has shifted, a lot of these figures feel like they have cover to start expressing their beliefs again without those who disagree being able to gin up any financial consequences.
Just as Dorsey was influenced by that abstract force you mention as 'illiberal consensus' because of fear of different factors (political, employee/stakeholders, financial consequences). Dorsey is now influenced by the likely new owner of Twitter because of fear of different factors (stakeholders, financial consequences), he wants the deal to go through he will not go on the record and contradict the person he is selling to. It was beneficial to be for the ban before, and now it is beneficial to be against it. Dorsey was the CEO. It is business, after all. Sounds like your argument (or conspiracy theories) and mine aren't that different.
Just to be explicit for all the rabid fans, I'm not against Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg or any other tech CEO. On the contrary, they have so much impact and are involved in multiple projects in so little time. I'm not proposing any conspiracy of them wanting to control us or whatever straw-man argument others are injecting on my comment. It's interesting to see this deal unfold from a business perspective with all the different stakeholders involved, and the flip-flopping of Dorsey's decisions.
> Dorsey is now influenced by the likely new owner of Twitter because of fear of different factors (stakeholders, financial consequences), he wants the deal to go through he will not go on the record and contradict the person he is selling to.
I don't know if you did this intentionally, but there's some rhetorical sleight-of-hand here that prevents it from cohering logically. This isn't a case of "not contradicting" the new buyer. Dorsey _actively tweeted out_ that he supported reversing the Trump ban. If he had simply not spoken on the issue at all, how on Earth would you consider that "contradicting the person he is selling to"? Note that in the converse scenario, he never actively tweeted out that he happened to personally agree with increasing speech restrictions.
There's a pretty obvious asymmetry here: a period of silent assent with heavier speech codes vs active support for lighter speech codes (where the latter is also consistent with tangentially-expressed personal views).
- Even in the wild case (I personally think it is not the case) which Jack fervently would still believe that the ban should go on, why do it? why add drama to a business deal and say "no, Musk is wrong"? that would just sour the whole business deal that he would benefit from. Or why would anyone be antagonistic to someone on the other side of the table, this applies to any other business deal not just this.
- Reporters or anybody would naturally question Jack, hey the new owner is saying this do you want to go on the record about why the new owner is against something that happened on your command? Paraphrasing: "Yes, I agree with him now, lets move on". Very diplomatic and 'correct' answer from his part.
It's not improbable that he was privately opposed to it, but he had to be publicly in favor of it in order to not undercut people like Vijaya Gadde and Del Harvey. Remember that Dorsey was also CEO of Square at the time and doing a bunch of crypto stuff. Dealing with Twitter drama was probably not the hill he wanted to die on.
No. He's even commented on this. He was CEO at the time, with a board of directors. He didn't "enact" it any more than any CEO "enacts" every single decision at any company.
This take should be framed and pinned to the top. Of all the hinged/unhinged comments, this one tries hard to be principled in fact. It's getting tiring hearing about how this heir to an emerald mine was going to enslave us all.
What does his presidential status of a nation or his support in an election unrelated to Twitter have to do with him breaching their terms of service?
I find it interesting, because it kind of implies that you would want him to get special treatment because of his status/position in this manner. But on Twitter he is nothing more than an account like everyone else. They control the platform that they created and own. Which they were able to do due to the free market policies established in the US.
The real problem in my opinion is using Twitter as a source of information. There is an arbitrary character limit, threads which allow Tweets to be taken out of context and the ability to ban anyone from reading ones Tweets.
Any sane person would realize that such a platform is perfect for propaganda and that it should not be used as a communication channel (by a government official).
Opposite ideologies have value yes, I was emphasizing on consolidation of power in a select few and alluding to fake competition. Also, the fact that Dorsey is flip flopping on a decision you can ultimately pin on him can be attributed to financially driven. I’m not against or for the ban, they can do whatever they want with their property.
Trump was a laughingstock in Western Europe. The rest of the world mostly either liked him (Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, Taiwan, etc) or was neutral. Opposite is true with Biden now: great relations with Western Europe, but Saudi Arabia won't take his calls
I changed my mind on it a bit when Biden popped up; I realised so much of what was funny/poked fun at in Trump were traits of Biden's (albeit less exaggerated perhaps) too, that really it's just a certain sort of American and sure maybe Trump's a bit of a caricature of it but it made him a bit less uniquely crazy how on Earth did that happen in my eyes.
Like Jeremy Corbyn's pretty far left wing, but politics aside he had a chance at being PM of the UK for a bit; maybe he would've seemed like a strange bumbling old man in other parts of the world, but here he's a recognisable type of person if you see what I mean, not massively unusual.
I just ended up thinking it was an attack on his (Trump's) character; that it worked so well outside of the USA because it's an unfamiliar one. But that's not fair, could even be called racist, and isn't on the basis of anything meaningful like actual policy etc. - which I know next to nothing about and seldom saw anything of substance reported on it; so I just disengaged from it really.
Now that we're more than a year past the election, it's pretty sobering to read the exact statements by Trump and how Twitter interpreted them as "We assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy".
One of the "damning" statements was “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Trump should have been banned before even running for office? Oh is that how it works now in Silicon Valley? Can we just ban all right wing politicians from twitter so they don't get elected? Sounds like democracy!
Yes? The vast majority people who get banned on Twitter or FB are banned before even running for office, whether they are left or right or center. Why should Trump be different?
Mh, yes we actually can. These platforms can ban anyone and it's fully within their rights. They are not regulated in a way which prevents them from doing that.
Sounds like liberty on their end, doesn't it? I do find it a little ironic, this is what you get in free market capitalism.
I think importantmsg is saying that he didn't use Twitter to break the law. I don't understand importantmsg's argument, but you also don't make sense.
He wasn't convicted of the two things you're point to, so they're just accusations.
If people should get banned for doing something illegal outside Twitter (or just being accused of doing so) then millions of people should get banned from Twitter.
The first example might not be a violation of the law at all. It's deeply unethical, but it might technically be legal.
The second example has many different interpretations. The most favorable one is that Trump was urging them to check everywhere to make sure no ballots were missed. Interpreting it as a direct call for ballot stuffing is also possible, but we can't assume that.
Humans tend to have good-faith interpretations of everything said by people they like and bad-faith interpretations of everything said by people they hate.
Yes, but I assume the context of “breaking laws” is in relation to his actions surrounding the 2020 election. I don’t think the court cases he was involved in before taking office played any part in his ban from Twitter.
Is there just a different set of free speech rules for the rich and powerful? If I incited violence on the platform, I doubt Elon or Dorsey would be letting me come back after a ban.
If the president is publicly instigating toward North Korea on your platform, arguably you have the responsibility to allow people to witness what's being said. In the same way, CNN arguably has the responsibility to broadcast it if he was recorded by their cameras.
It's probably not in the public interest to broadcast every person's incitations of violence or bigotry, but the president? Yes. Certainly you're not implying you should be treated exactly the same as the president of the United States...
The public's interest is a weak argument. I can say it's not in the public's interest to have someone who lost the popular vote in office at all, but that is only my opinion and doesn't speak to the original point.
I'm implying that the spirit of free speech should apply equally to all. If the president can come back after inciting violence, then everyone else should as well. It's not a selective principle that you get to choose how you follow.
If you don't want violent rhetoric to spread then yes, limiting free speech and universally applying those rules is a viable path to achieve that.
Otherwise, you create a regulatory environment that only applies to you if you don't have the power, political capital, or fanbase to yell loud enough in your favor.
The great irony is that you can't really do much to incite violence, no matter how hard you try; the rich and powerful, with their large platforms and massive followings, can do it with very little effort.
There are literally dozens of incidents, on video, of Trump inciting violence, on a small and large scale.
From telling a crowd that they should beat up a heckler and he'd pay their legal bills (lol), to saying "maybe some of you second amendment types can do something about Hillary", and beyond.
The crime was inciting an insurrection. The president was not charged due to partisan politics, no president has ever actually been voted out by the Senate of their own party (correct me if I'm wrong), but historically this has been the most votes received from their party. It's recommended to understand both the background and the event on January 6th to get a clear picture, including attempts to overturn the election. More details here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald...
Twitter is responsible for moderating the users their platform, regardless of whether they are free speech purists. You cannot let your users plot crimes. That's why sites like Silk Road and AlphaBay were shut down.
You can easily find tweets calling for trump and republicans to be killed on twitter from years ago and nobody bothered to ban those people so your statement rings hollow.
Given were talking about the trump ban I'm not sure it is, he was banned, countless antifa accounts calling for Andy ngo's death were not.
There is a clear double standard, pointing that out isn't whataboutism it's simply calling bullshit on someone using the incite violence argument to say trump should stay banned.
> It's recommended to understand both the background and the event on January 6th to get a clear picture.
As a non American who watched the summer of 2020 riots in absolute awe I will never understand why people even mention the 6th. It just doesn't compare.
> Is there just a different set of free speech rules for the rich and powerful?
Yes, just like there's one for left wing vs right wing. Trump was banned for violence for saying he won't attend the inauguration. Yet tweets calling for violence against the right are allowed. Many of them are years old.
> Is there just a different set of free speech rules for the rich and powerful?
Of course there is. Twitter's owner appoint managers who hire people to oversee censorship on the platform. These choices themselves are already biased towards the owners' interests and points of view. If you add to this ability of rich and powerful people/organizations to harass or influence Twitter, the bias is even stronger.
Having said that - the tweet Trump was suspended for:
It's not surprising that someone who sounds like a sort of free speech absolutist agrees that permanent bans are bad for the idea of free and accessible speech.
The problem I have with some free speech purists is that they give me a feeling that they are persons who are more often than not unaffected by speech that can be categorised as inciting hatred towards a people, and thus they see little to no problem with being able to spread harmful bad faith speech freely on an algorithmic social media site - or any place for that matter.
It's a tricky thing for which there are no real correct answers. What I do know is that socially and politically we have several unwritten rules about what, where and how to speak about things because not abiding by those rules results in things as minor as slight embarrassment to as severe as physical violence. That is to say, things can spiral out of hand and the usefulness of speech deteriorates if some standards are not kept.
Twitter shouldn't be the judge of what an American president can say, because the American people should have already filtered out a person of such low integrity from gaining a position in such a high public office. All this time I've felt amused by how much our American friends can talk about what should or shouldn't Twitter do, but seemingly never discuss how they can as a society make sure that the executive office doesn't get filled by someone who brought their entire democratic process to disrepute.
To conclude, I think if you aren't scared of what another Trump can do to your country or its societal fabric or your personal freedoms then I see no reason why a Dorsey doesn't think Trump should be allowed to come back. The women of his country already saw what one term of Trump did to the rights they thought they had. Not all political turmoil is scary for those who are safe from politics.
"The problem I have with some free speech purists is that they give me a feeling that they are persons who are more often than not unaffected by speech"
There's a mirror image problem though: people in favor of regulations on speech have little reason to fear that their speech will be limited, at least in the short term. Regulators are politically-correct, so if you are politically-correct, what's the problem? (Obviously: bad things can become politically-correct, too.)
The example I always use here as someone who grew up in the 90s is that having an openly gay character on network tv used to be extremely controversial at best and politically untenable at worst.
Except the side who are "free speech absolutists" are worried about those gay characters kissing in "She-Ra" remake or various Disney+ cartoons where men kiss, and want that stuff censored off the airs.
> Except the side who are "free speech absolutists" are worried about those gay characters kissing in "She-Ra" remake or various Disney+ cartoons where men kiss,
Does holding freedom of speech as an ideal mean you must never dislike anything or tell anyone else that you dislike it? Is Elon giving orders to Disney+ about what they can and can't show? Is he going to ban Disney from using Twitter now because two guys kissed in a cartoon?
> and want that stuff censored off the airs.
There is indeed censorship of broadcast media but it long predates Elon or Twitter and it's done by the FCC.
> And then want to ban the book "Maus", etc. etc.
Removing a book from the curriculum and replacing it with another book that teaches pretty much the same thing is hardly "banning" it. Did students face disciplinary action or criminal charges for possessing a copy of Maus on school grounds? Did parents who bought a copy for their kids get a visit from the sheriff? Was Amazon ordered to stop selling it?
It's ridiculous. If you think about it almost all books are similarly "banned" as there are countless possible books you could have kids read and very limited time and space on the curriculum. We had the Pearson algebra textbook in high school so I guess that means the McGraw-Hill one was "banned".
No. Maus was removed from an 8th grade curriculum list because of graphic depictions of sexuality/violence/language, but the school board sought alternative, age-appropriate works to teach about the Holocaust with (<https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2022/01/27/why-did-ten...>). To say that Maus is "banned", and not any and every other book the board decides to not include on its curriculum, is inaccurate.
Not everything fits neatly into tribal politics, especially not tribal US politics specifically. Twitter, the internet, etc are all platforms that are open to places other than the States, I don't think it makes sense to link everything about its moderation to D vs. R politics.
I consider myself somewhat of a libertarian / "classical liberal". I'm therefore something of a "free speech absolutist", have no issue with gay characters, and hate the idea of banning books. Not everyone who thinks differently than you do about free speech fits into a neat little caricature.
I'm certainly not accusing you of being a hypocrite. Largely because I don't know you.
I'm accusing my family, friends, coworkers, of being a hypocrite. Because I know them and have seen how their values have changed on this issue. They're for "free speech" and "against cancel culture" one day, and then for "banning LGBTQ+ cartoons from Netflix" the next day.
Usually, speech to children is considered separately.
I'd consider myself a libertarian free speech absolutist. I don't think anything should be banned from Netflix. I do think what teachers say in the classroom should be carefully controlled and parents should have a lot of control over what speech their children are exposed to more generally (e.g. filters on Netflix), because children almost by definition find it extremely difficult to separate truths from untruths and are much more impressionable than adults. Part of being a parent is deciding how to raise your kids and what beliefs to teach them. That's one reason totalitarian states always try so hard to indoctrinate children - it's easy, and they're a weak spot through which adults can be attacked in turn (see the sordid history of children being convinced to spy on their parents).
A big part of the fights in the USA at the moment and in culture more generally are about this sort of underhanded tactic - where one ideology that's losing the battle of ideas tries to short circuit it by indoctrinating children. Arguably that's where CRT came from. It's not a coincidence it emerged from academia, a place filled with impressionable teenagers.
So.... when will that guy start talking about the benefits of Free Speech in China? Particularly, the Shanghai factory that Elon Musk has been so proud of?
Same same. Twitter bends its "free speech" in China so that it can operate in that country. Its all about the money to them, they'd rather get that Chinese-money than to piss off their new overlords and actually make a racket about free-speech issues over there.
Short-term isn't really that short. Witness all the tales of teachers not being able to admit to being gay in the 90s without risking getting fired, or don't ask, don't tell, which was only repealed roughly a decade ago. These speech restrictions were all being pushed by the American GOP, which is now reversing course less than a few years later as they find the cultural tides shifting away from moral majority, satanic panic type stuff that saw them banning 2 Live Crew and Judas Priest albums toward political correctness and now it's their speech being restricted. There is no good reason to think this is some permanent state of affairs and the tides won't shift back the other way again, or that it will take centuries or something. If history is any guide, it'll happen before current college students even hit middle age.
> Wasn't DADT instituted by the Clinton administration?
“Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue” was, as official policy when implemented, a relaxation of the pre-existing hard ban on homosexuality in the military—which was a prohibition with Ask, Tell-or-face-additional-punishment-for-concealment, and Pursue any indication from any aspect of a service members personal life that might tend to suggest homosexual orientation—to a ban on public homosexual conduct.
(In practice, it tended to be much less and much less consistent of a relaxation as suggested by the official policy.)
When people are talking about the repeal of DADT, what they really are referring to is the repeal of the longstanding prohibition of homosexuality in the military, of which DADT was the last and, at least in it's overt terms the mildest, manifestation.
Also, DADT was adopted because Clinton was trying to split the baby of fulfilling his campaign promise of lifting the ban and minimizing friction with the GOP as part of a strategy to minimize risk to higher priority legislative priorities.
Parents’ Music Resource Center had four founders, the other one who was a wife of a federal official was Susan Baker, wife of Bush’s then-Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III.
What you and responders have missed is the 1st Amendment is totally and entirely inapplicable to Twitter. There is a misunderstanding here of the Amendment. It only applies to federal, state, and local government actors. This is a broad category that includes not only lawmakers and elected officials, but also public schools and universities, courts, and police officers. It does not include private citizens, businesses, and organizations. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional. No other entity or group is bound by the 1st Amendment. And this is by the Founders' design, because extending the 1st Amendment to all entities and groups would in fact limit freedom.
Belief in free speech is an ideology. The US Constitution's first amendment is a restriction against the US government in passing laws restricting speech. The two are not the same thing.
Belief in free speech is a fundamental prerequisite to free thought. We express all critical thinking in words - if that speech cannot be shared, then neither can the ideas.
There is nothing more tyrannical than restricting speech, which is something the Founders recognized quite well, given their own situation with the English king as well as that of their recent ancestors fleeing their European homelands for a new, tough land half a world away - it was worth the travail/travel (same root word) for that freedom.
The Free Speech of the 1st Amendment, not only only applies to government entities, it is not absolute. Obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, threats and solicitations to commit crimes are not protected speech. They are examples of restricted speech, and according to you, there "is nothing more tyrannical than restricting speech." Death to tyrants restricting you from producing child pornography, right? The Founders' intention of the Bill of Rights is only and only can be a restriction on what the government can and can't do in regards to an individual's freedoms. If the Founders were here today, they would insist that the 1st Amendment does not extend to limit the freedom od business or private citizens. I can censor you and you can censor me, and it is is our right and our freedom to do so. The government, and only the government, can not. This is intentional. Don't like Twitter censuring you? Start your own company that promotes your own political ideals. You are free to do so.
>> Death to tyrants restricting you from producing child pornography, right?
Did you seriously compared free speech to child pornography? Why not add murder and stealing in the mix as well, that will make your point stand out even more.
You will find countless quotes such as the following among the founding fathers: "The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." - Thomas Jefferson
To imagine they would see the current scenario where the government and a handful of corporations are working in cahoots to suppress expression + drive self censorship on a scale unlike anything in our history, and go "Yip, working as intended." is just disingenuous.
I strongly disagree. And Jefferson was not talking about ochlocracy, which is itself tyrannical. You think the Founders were unaware of commerce and business during their era? Why did they then intentionally limit government with the Bill of Rights, and not also have it restrict business and private citizens? Because doing so would create less freedom and less security.
Look at the text of the Amendment:
Congress shall make no law... prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech
So you see, we don't need to extend the First Amendment to restrict corporations or private citizens, because they do not and can not make laws. Only Congress can make laws. What we have is a non-sequitor. The First Amendment, logically and rationally, can not possibly apply to companies like Twitter.
So if you do want to limit corporations with Free Speech, you can so so, that is what the Tenth Amendment is for.
Please stop assaulting the Bill of Rights with not very well thought out and fundamentally self-entitled and capricious whims. Only 2/3rd majority of Congress or of the state legislatures can change the Constitution. It is set as a high standard intentionally. Try to understand why. Because it's not about you and what you want, it is about the interests of everyone altogether and not everyone shares your shallow opinions. The Founders certainly didn't.
Free speech is much larger than just the first amendment (if you can believe it, some people actually live outside the USA).
It is perfectly consistent to believe in free speech, support the first amendment, and also want platforms like Twitter to allow for the free speech of it's users.
Yes, absolutely. But it is not constitutionally resolvable.
Mucking with the Constitution, such as extending the 1st Amendment beyond restriction of government, such as suspending habeas corpus, such as fulfilling 5th Amendment requirements with secret trials, such as adding an interpretation of self-defense to the 2nd Amendment that the Founders debated and intentionally left out, is all really very dangerous because these alterations are effectively diluting our freedoms until they become unrecognizable, and it begins to look like conservative agenda to dismantle government to allow those with money and rich corporations to exploit masses of individuals without limitations.
Considering Justice Scalia's unnecessary and unsupportable and overreaching (without 2/3rds majority of Congress or the state legislatures) reinterpretation of the 2nd to include self-defense fundamentally changes the Founders intent from a selfless right to stand against tyranny to a selfish and redundant right to protect your flatscreen TV. This was nothing less than vandalism, and we are all less safe for it. It is the same with Guantanamo and the suspension of habeas. This did us no favors and reduced the rights of every citizen. It is the same thing with killing Anwar al-Awlaki (let's be clear tho, he was evil), a US citizen, without a public indictment by a Grand Jury nor a public trial, really screws everyone and is a step towards changing our world into Kafka's nightmare, and worse, because we're teetering in the edge of widespread ecosystem collapse due to the activities of big business. Once we change so much of the framework, our government will collapse, and along with it, our individual freedoms, and the slow murder of Earth will be put into overdrive. Then we'll all be dead.
So let's work out problems like the Hollywood Blacklist without mucking with the Bill of Rights.
Those people know how to manage their response to speech they do not like. Should we free people of that burden, the range of permissible speech will be a small subset of speech overall.
The outcome of that is few people being able to have real conversations. Contrived, Disneyland type discourse would then be the norm.
Frankly, that would inhibit understanding one another and further limit speech.
At some point, people must weigh incoming speech and manage what they do with it or there simply will not be all that much left to be said.
Trump was a fairly average right-wing politician. Another Bush, or McCain, or Romney would have nominated the same Supreme Court Justices and had more or less identical policy.
The few times Trump went against the grain he was overruled in the House and Senate, and ultimately he peacefully transferred power to the next president despite the rioting after he lost the election. So the implicit argument that he was some kind of danger to democracy or radical force that tore up the fabric of society seems like nothing more than partisanship. At the least his actions didn't seem like a huge departure from any other politician. I remember in 2016 the exact opposite people were claiming the election was rigged and the results needed to be overturned.
So you’re saying this wanna be dictator failed with his coup attempt, so ultimately he had to "peacefully" transfer power. So there was no danger and we should move along, nothing to see here, just partisanship.
Do I need to explain what’s wrong with your reasoning?
> I remember in 2016 the exact opposite people were claiming the election was rigged and the results needed to be overturned.
One difference is Hillary Clinton officially conceded the morning after the election in 2016, meanwhile Trump to this day, a year and a half later, still insists he still won the 2020 election and that it was rigged.
Those people you're referring to in 2016 also didn't storm the Capitol trying to overturn the election results by physical force.
Despite this, I don't think it was the best decision to give Trump a permanent ban on Twitter, and it's probably time to let him back on. Politics is full of people saying really stupid things and denying reality, why single him out.
It only bled other people off the platform and made them seek other platforms, further dividing and segregating people into their echo chambers even more.
Hillary Clinton did not take the loss well despite the appearance, and she still uses the word stolen. Stacey Abrams seems to have a similar story. Trump sounds like a broken record and a sore loser, but the main reason I don't take him seriously at this point is that there's not much work being done to secure the next election. I don't agree with ballot harvesting, last-minute voting rule changes, or the execution with poorly-designed election machines. No one was ever proactive about this when it would have mattered though.
Trump did get shafted on his Twitter ban, and even people that didn't seem to be supporters looked at the justification and were left perplexed. It was not a statement of facts, but there was reading between the lines and assuming the worse without gathering information. Despite any accounting of what went down that day, it does seem like the response is extremely biased and lopsided. People held on vague charges of obstruction because their cell phone data showed them outside the building are still being indefinitely detained. Whether it's Trump or his so-called co-conspirators, if there was a crime, you would think the gears of justice would turn a little faster because there's plenty of motivation.
Dorsey is magically a "Free Speech" advocate now that it doesn't affect his checkbook. Erm, yeah. (See: Twitter in China for prior reference)
I'll file his newfound respect for rights over here next to all the Trump cronies who seem to magically find respect for rights between the time they resign and their next book deal.
Women haven't lost any rights that I can think of. The US has extremely liberal abortion laws [1]. Even many liberal legal analysts believe Roe is past due to be overturned-- the US constitution says nothing about rights to terminate a pregnancy.
If anything, unborn babies may have gained the right to life.
> if you aren't scared of what another Trump can do to your country or its societal fabric or your personal freedoms [..]
I think instead of being scared of what allowing unethical speech can bring and trying to censor it, we should work towards ensuring that there is equal and opposing points of view, hopefully with better reasoned arguments. As far as I can tell the problem is that the people which are able to put those points of view "on paper" rarely bother to do so, because arguing against someone like Trump never encounters a good faith debate, and most of the times, it's so obvious that it's so wrong. But of course that it's not obviously wrong for a vast number of people, and explicitly stating it, might help them.
Expanding on this discussion see the exchange between Peter Boghossian and Laurie Penny in one of the classics of letter.wiki: https://letter.wiki/conversation/863
"The women of his country already saw what one term of Trump did to the rights they thought they had."
I see very little connection between anything that might be deemed "unacceptable" speech by Trump and the imminent overturn of Roe. Other than the fact that he got elected.
That's kind of how it works, though, innit: wannabe autocrat demagogue gets a bullhorn, uses it to leverage power via populist rhetoric, then shoves activist justices onto the bench — who, surprise, do their activist thing...
That's the "very little connection" you're missing.
Whatever one thinks of the legal grounding of the Roe decision, those criticisms pale in comparison to throwing stare decisis out the window and trying to make an enumerated-rights argument without even addressing the 9th amendment[1] in the room.
Charitable descriptions are, at this point, unmerrited.
[1]"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people"
SCOTUS hasn't used the ninth amendment much, and it wasn't the basis for Roe (though I think RBG would have preferred that it was).
I think intellectual honesty would lead most people to think that Roe had to go. The only question was: do we fix it with better reasoning (if some Constitutional basis does exist), or throw it out. Casey tried to do the former but didn't quite seem to do it. So now it's gone and left to the states.
I suspect only a few states will go extreme. And they'll have to see the consequences and try to make it work, or answer to the electorate.
And the new decision is on even less constitutional grounds. There is nothing in the constitution that allows a state to force a woman to carry a baby. But it happens to be their preferred judicial activism, and therefore somehow not applicable.
So in your view the government cannot make laws against abortion because the constitution doesn't say they can? If that is the case then we can't have laws against rape, assault, reckless driving, etc. The 10th amendment says any power not granted to the federal government and not banned by the constitution is left for the states.
Those judges were all Bushites (see their backgrounds and how they didn't help Trump steal 2020). Trump was the most pro-choice Republican in a while, he just didn't care at all about the Supreme Court and outsourced it to the very pro-life Republican establishment. If Jeb or Romney had won in 2016 this would have probably happened earlier
His entire platform was "say shit to piss people off." It's what got him elected, and what allowed him to pack SCOTUS. That's not even hyperbole, their campaign tried very hard to replicate this success in 2020.
Look if you think being a serial liar with unimaginable power to a common person and never having to be accountable for free speech (“I can’t show you my taxes” - that’s a good one) then society is broken. The megaphone of lies convinces stupid people who have the right to vote. It’s clear they don’t have the intellect to vote responsibly, and that can be attributed to Facebook and Twitter letting any miscreant or moron ingest intellectual poison.
Merrick Garland should be on the court and if you disagree then you are arguing in bad faith.
> Look if you think being a serial liar with unimaginable power to a common person and never having to be accountable for free speech (“I can’t show you my taxes” - that’s a good one) then society is broken.
...'twas ever thus.
But seriously: nothing in my comment was specific to any particular politician. I am a free speech absolutist because I don't trust you to judge what I'm allowed to hear. For all values of "you".
The correct reaction to "omg, this person whom I hate just won the election!" is not to censor the person in some desperate, misguided attempt to prevent people from liking him. It's to offer a better alternative in the marketplace of ideas. Asserting that you can't do this because "society is broken", or similar excuses, is just a cop-out.
> The megaphone of lies convinces stupid people who have the right to vote. It’s clear they don’t have the intellect to vote responsibly, and that can be attributed to Facebook and Twitter letting any miscreant or moron ingest intellectual poison.
So instead of letting stupid people vote, you would prefer that their vote is manipulated and therefore cast for them? You would prefer a fascist state?
Your assumption that everyone is so stupid that they automatically believe everything is actually quite racist and authoritarian.
You assume people can't think for themselves in any capacity so you need to protect them. That's an authoritarian mindset that needs to be removed from this country entirely.
> * One because the elected Republicans fought to deny Obama the nomination
Actually, this rule, the so-called "Biden Rule" was created by Joe Biden in 1992 in explaining his refusal to "confirm any election-year Bush nominees leaned explicitly on the different standards applicable to divided government" [1]
> Were there a vacancy, Biden argued, Bush should “not name a nominee until after the November election is completed,” and if he did, “the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over.”
U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP) [2]
> “Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself,” he continued. “Where the nation should be treated to a consideration of constitutional philosophy, all it will get in such circumstances is partisan bickering and political posturing from both parties and from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.” [2]
You've missed out Kennedy (strategically retired) and counted Scalia twice (died during Obama's term.) Kennedy wasn't anything to do with "luck" and I'd dispute that Scalia was either - he could probably have died a year earlier and McConnell would still have blocked the seat.
Didn't his opposition run on the same platform and still continues to run? Making his supporters the worst possible people while openly supporting domestic terrorist ideologies and organisations. And being racist and pro discrimination.
OK, that's more indirect than I understood the point to be: you're saying that he used unacceptable speech to get elected, and that resulted in the imminent overturn of Roe.
I have to say that I'm very uncomfortable limiting any kind of speech on the grounds that it may get the wrong person elected.
If someone says something hateful and gets elected, that's just one of the flaws of democracy. But I haven't heard of any better system.
The U.S. has checks and balances to slow down the worst of it. I mean, given how much Trump wanted to do vs how much he actually did, it's pretty clear the system worked.
I'm pro-choice, but I also know that many people aren't, and the Constitution is certainly not clear on the point. So even though I don't want Roe overturned, it's basically the system working as designed.
Even perfect systems don't produce perfect outcomes all the time. If you have an idea for improvements to the system, I'm all ears, but limiting speech of political candidates is very likely a regression. It doesn't take much imagination to see how that could be turned against you.
Well, judges have limited power, too, and it comes largely from the text in front of them (not entirely, but largely).
SCOTUS is not the only mechanism for preserving rights. We also have state constitutions, elected representatives, etc., and it seems like those are also (mostly) doing their part to protect bodily autonomy.
With a strong enough mandate, there could also be federal laws.
But we are in a country where not everyone agrees and the text is ambiguous, so I don't really know what you expect to happen that would be in line with democratic principles.
I don't agree with government regulation of what should or should not be in a site's code of conduct. Requiring codes of conduct to be enforced equally on all users, however, merits some thought.
But then the entire business model becomes even less viable than it already is. Twitter and other social media have to rely on outsourced overworked and underpaid reviewers who will never have the time or training understand context (regularly receiving veiled threats[1] and not having anyone act on them made me quit twitter) and make thousands of decisions per hour. It doesn't scale any other way.
I think the other side of the argument has value though. If Twitter is large enough that it has such huge social impact rivalling that of governments, why should a single ceo or board be able to make these decisions.
We shouldn’t be expecting or perhaps even allowing twitter to make these calls at this scale. Twitter is beyond just a private company offering a product. It’s now a serious utility.
A ban on a web site is usually driven by one or more violations of Terms of Service. Some of those Terms of Service are linked to criminal laws and the company wants to protect itself from being prosecuted, liable to damages, etc.
I dislike the use of the words "freedom of speech" when it comes to social media/web sites because uneducated people seem to think a ban is a violation of the 1st US amendment. Which is even sillier when a website allows users globally. I doubt the conversations will suddenly change to "freedom to violate ToS" but I feel like there is a better wording than "freedom of speech".
If a camping website banned content about Bigfoot because they wanted to and you posted something about Bigfoot and got banned, its not a freedom of speech issue, its more like a "No Shirt, No, Shoes = No Service" issue.
Freedom of speech is just a loose concept. The first amendment is an implementation of freedom of speech. It’s still accurate for a business to say they support and implement freedom of speech even if they are not legally obligated to.
I'm more on the "I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It" -boat. Actually I though most people here would be, I'm a bit disappointed tbh.
Especially when the facts turn out to be faked. Only one person died at the riot: a woman protestor who was shot by an African American cop. Only later, one person later died from overdosing on drugs and 3 died of natural causes. If we wait 100 years the casualty list will grow to 100%.
They can, but the question is whether that's what happened. I think Dorsey was always on the side of free speech in principle. Twitter used to market itself as "the free speech wing of the free speech party". [1]
He probably wasn't in a strong enough position to be able to resist the pressure to silence Trump.
Hypocrisy has nothing to do with changing your mind over time. It had to do with taking actions which are consistent with your stated position, and holding yourself up to the same moral and ethical standards to which you hold others.
in this case there's no reason to believe he changed his mind
it's much more likely that one of the two views was simply him expressing what he thought was the most politically opportunistic opinion to express at the time
Honestly, this entire thing is ridiculous. The logic behind Dorsey's comment on this is essentially "I don't think Trump should've been banned for his actions but I didn't feel comfortable saying so at the time. So I banned him, waited for the fuss to die down, and now I'm going to change my mind because I've got political cover".
The only good thing I think that will come from this deal is that Musk will be direct about his absurd position where Dorsey was two-faced. It's absolutely wild to see Dorsey essentially publicly admit that he disagreed with most of his own decisions running twitter.
He's getting a billion dollars out of this, maybe that's playing a part too, to lend Musk some additional cover. Look, even the guy who banned him thinks differently now.
I mean that was the whole reason Musk bought twitter, you will never convince me otherwise.
But are there things that can get you banned on the "new" twitter?
Because then any concern about unbanning him and similar is a moot point because they will be banned again within a month or two as long as rules are enforced.
However I am dubious rules will be enforced. I think everything is going to be "nudge nudge wink wink".
Before this turns into a culture-war-fest consider this: if Twitter is to be a global platform, it probably should NOT take political sides and if it is to censor anyone permanently, it should mostly adhere to local courts and similar entities. It's not about Trump or United States. It's about everyone else.
World is a really messy place. It's not very easy generally to decided if in a political conflict one or other party has moral high ground. For instance we have several Nobel peace price winners now participating in plausible genocide (Aung Sang Suu Kyi and Abiy Ahmed). Who has the moral high ground? I have no frigging idea, but I don't think an unelected corporation should decide either.
If Twitter takes the side Trump is a crook and should be perma-banned, this creates a precedent for silencing the voices of opposition voices around the globe.
Edit: I mean in the context if Twitter is designed to be a fair medium for anyone to express themselves. Of course it does not have to be like that and can block anyone without infringing anyones rights as such.
Their TOS and policies are vague enough to allow selective enforcement, which is a complaint that I've seen many times. Fewer people would take issue with Twitter (and all social media) if they were more transparent.
Trump wasn't banned for being a crook but for inciting violence and repeatedly breaking the terms of service. He got away with far more instances of breaking the ToS than any normal person would.
I know there is a fine line between things like Freedom Fighters/Extremists/Terrorists depending on how it's viewed and who is viewing it. Similarly inciting violence could be muddled away with enough rhetoric or only selectively enforce, as governments often do.
Likely the best solution is to update the laws around social media use or extend the previous laws to include those instances and then apply it equally to all.
All of that said though, Trump very much repeatedly broke the ToS and rightfully deserved to banned before he became president.
How come this is not a widely held opinion? This view should be a norm. Do not ban a president of a country on social media. Period. When a private company decides to do so, it should be profusely condemned by everyone. Should Putin's twitter be banned as well?
I still view Twitter (back when I was on it) as a private business. Like a pub. Chat rubbish, cause trouble, get thrown out.
At the time of the elections, do you remember all the memes about how Twitter was just a tiny portion of voters and that the vast majority were not even on Twitter?
Twitter is not a town square or a centre of free speech. It's a small dive bar in the corner of the city.
Where did I say that politicians have the right to stay on a private website? Yes, Twitter has the right to ban people. As do restaurants not serve certain people. But if a restaurant decides to not serve Jews let's say, I will obviously condemn them.
If you believe in free speech you should have absolutely condemned Twitter when they banned the president.
> if a restaurant decides to not serve Jews I will obviously condemn them.
They'll have serious legal problems pretty quickly for doing something so illegal.
> If you believe in free speech you should have absolutely condemned Twitter when they banned the president.
I believe in free speech and property rights. Which means if Twitter decides someone can't be on Twitter anymore due to their actions then that's their right. And if Twitter's new ownership makes some different decisions on who's allowed to be on Twitter, that's also their right.
I find this comparison strange. Yes, a restaurant should not be allowed to not serve Jews. But they should be allowed to not serve _a_ Jew, if the Jew in question breaks their rule of conduct. Like the case with Trump and Twitter.
But this puts Twitter in the business of fomenting insurrection against the country it operates in. Trump was banned not for expressing morally ambiguous political positions, but because he fomented a mob to attack the Capitol and he used Twitter specifically during that insurrection to cause the mob to focus its attack on the Vice President. He was watching the events in real time on TV, and he was using Twitter to stoke the flames. Why should Twitter allow its platform to be used that way?
What is Twitter supposed to do, ban Trump for a week every time he uses their platform to advocate for violence? Does that mean we can all advocate for violence on Twitter? I mean, have they really thought this through?
Plenty of people are not banned for breaking the rules. People literally calling for the death of people are on Twitter and their tweets still up. You may have been banned, but there is no guarantee.
A sitting president with millions of followers has a lot more power to create actual harm via some random tweet than some random teenager with 3 followers. How is this not obvious?
On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump Tweeted:
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
Shortly thereafter, the President Tweeted:
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Those two tweets are perma-ban worthy? I'm glad nobody has paid attention to what I typed into region chat in MMOs for the past 20 years...
That blog post looks pretty bad here in 2022. The rationale to justify the suspension is vague enough that anyone could be suspended for just about any reason. There is a lot of weasel phrasing in it ("...may also serve as encouragement" [according to who?], "...is being received by a number of his supporters" [who?], "...also being interpreted" [again, by who?], "...is being interpreted..." [by who?]).
It reminds me of forums I was on in the early 2000s; moderators would ban unsavory folks. How that actually happens is not "a rule is broken leads to a ban", but rather, rules are combed through when a ban is desired.
> How that actually happens is not "a rule is broken leads to a ban", but rather, rules are combed through when a ban is desired.
I had the experience of moderating one of the larger political forums on reddit and in my experience this still happens. There were some mods who clearly had ideological axes to grind despite their insistence of impartiality.
Wow, I didn’t realize those were the tweets he was banned for. That blog post includes some pretty twisted mental gymnastics to try and explain how those tweets justify their decision.
You're leaving out the fact that those tweets were sent two days after an insurrection in which Trump used Twitter to target the Vice President with a mob. In the days thereafter, Trump was being urged to cool things down because tensions were still red hot. Instead, he refused to back off the very narrative that got people fired up enough to literally assault our democratic process. There was a legitimate worry that he was still using Twitter to signal to his supporters (who again, had just sacked the capitol) that they should attack the inauguration of Joe Biden next. That was the real and legitimate concern at the time.
How many insurrections are you willing to let Trump coordinate on your platform? Two? More?
Insurrection? The most armed civilian segment in the entire world, that didn't bring their guns to this fantastic insurrection event?! The same group who was let into various private chambers, for maximum effect, sometimes walking so close to single file that it would bring a tear to a second grade teachers eye...
If that's your definition of insurrection, there can be infinity more of them on my platform.
My definition of an insurrection is a coordinated violent movement intended to overthrow the government. Pay attention during the Jan 6 committee hearings next month and then get back to me, because it appears you haven’t really been paying attention to the developments on that front if you believe guns weren’t brought on Jan 6.
Honestly, this whole "Elon Musk is the enemy" narrative has to take a self-reflection.
"Current Twitter" – the one that is supposingly the angel of protecting the will of the people – got Trump elected. Full stop. Trump's tweets were promoted by Twitter. So in the life time of Twitter, "Current Twitter" wants to take credit for the last 5 seconds? Good luck with that.
It is baffling that people think a person should be permanently banned from access to any "public forum", which Twitter has become.
To the people deriding Trump, you do recognize that no actual criminals are prevented from excersing speech? Even if you believe he is a criminal, the law of this country does not agree. You dislike him, great. You don't get to remove everything that you disagree with from a public forum.
To the ideologues believing that Republicans are destroying 'democracy', recall that this country is a constutional republic and the reason is because pure democracy, or majority rule, degrades to mob rule. To not make the mistake of equating freedom with democracy.
Not all votes are equal! What blasphemy! Not all people are engaged, informed and care about preserving the sovereignty of the nation. We have a system designed to keep those people from destroying our liberty.
The system allows the people to pick representatives who are sworn by oath to act as an informed and engaged agent on their behalf.
Our duty is to try our best to pick those agents that will put aside their interests and live by their oath.
Should there be a Penal/Criminal Code for Social Media violations rather than indefinite bans?
Edit: By the respective tech companies not something enforced by any branch of government.
In germany, there is. What the courts will make of those laws is still TBD.
Regimes do copy these laws to put anti state opinions behind bars, though.
It's hard to find a middle ground, mostly depending on culture and acceptable offenses by both believers in a message and feelings of people hurt by offensive proposals or hateful speech.
I think moderation is at the discretion of the content provider. I endorse banning Trump and I also endorse unbanning Trump. That's how the first amendment works.
So I guess Hitler would not have been banned from Twitter under Elon Musks rule? Because inciting violence is free speech as long as someone else does the bad deeds.
Seems like they're making slightly different arguments. Dorsey is saying it was wrong to permenantly ban, rather than suspend Trump.
He's also saying it was a business decision, and it shouldn't have been. Honestly I don't know what that means. Every decision Twitter makes is a business decision. He violated the rules repeatedly and got away with it, I think it was absolutely the right choice.
Jack is showing that he’s unprincipled. He doesn’t shape his decisions around principles, he shapes his ostensible “principles” around his decisions.
The question they (Jack, but also Elon) ask themselves is not “what’s the principled decision to make?” but “What’s best for me in this moment?” and in the moment Trump was banned, banning Trump was the best decision for Jack. And now the best decision for Jack is not to ban trump…
Principles are not absolutes, principles can evolve. Principles are not mandatory, people can operate without principles.
I am arguing that Jack (and Elon) profess to be principled people (in this case, free speech) yet Jack is clearly demonstrating a radical shift in perspective without an accompanying radical shift in principles, which must only be the sign of someone who doesn’t follow principles.
How can Jack hold the same principled view today that he held 2 years ago but disavow the choices he made 2 years ago? If you compress radically different virtues you don’t get the same principles.
I'd be surprised if they were remotely worried about that, seems much more likely they either believe it to be the right thing to do on principle (as claimed) - of course, whether it's the free speech principle they claim, or a pro-Trump principle, is another question - or believe that the views/engagements they get from having him on Twitter outweigh the negatives.
I agree with reversing the ban.[1] Right along with many others.
Frankly, permabans really need thinking through.
At a minimum, multiple bans, or feature limits should precede them, and there should be required process associated with a permanent ban, including appeals.
That may seem excessive and or burdensome. I agree.
Small venues that do not come with considerable life implications can and should be exempt.
Big venues are making plenty of money, or have the means to do that, and are interwoven with society to a degree worth the effort.
In general, the cancel moves we see rising in prominence are not answers in themselves. Trump sucks. Alex Jones sucks, and arguably more!
Banning them was not helpful. It does feel good to those who dislike their speech, but it had near zero impact on others who value and seek more of their speech. Closing the door hard luke that hardens those people, who then present notable resolve to follow a favored speaker and or act on their behalf.[0]
What is does not do is open them up to receive remedial speech of any kind.
Having the media then attack these people, often speaking for them, is not a good look particularly given the level of error (and I am being charitable) in their own speech, often labeled authoritative. Again, despite considerable error.
Finally, we have and will continue to see this abused to silence both critics and competing speech. This speech is both necessary and prior to massive media consolidation, considered normal, healthy behavior in a functioning democracy.
I should also mention there is a shared burden related to speech we do not like and that burden lies with any of us and how we choose to respond to speech we do not like.
That offense can be gamed is a problem too. People are as offended as they think they are and the basis for said offence varies widely. A claim of profound offence can be made and others have very little to validate it with.
At a minimum, responding to speech we do not like with righteous indignation generally escalates the dialog into unproductive meta. Almost any other response will fare better. Other responses include: humor, questions, rebuttals, redirects, reconsideration... any of which can take a conversation t9 a productive, far less harmful place. Emphasis on how we all manage incoming speech would do a lot of good, rather than the ongoing harm being used to cast the idea of free speech aside and or solidify some entities as authorities, sans meaningful checks on their speech, which also gets abused. The most common abuse is manufacturing consent.
[0] Source is behavior observed in a fair number of people who fall into one or more categories implied by my comment.
> There is no need for Twitter to signal-boost the idiotic shit this person says.
This is an important point. They could let him back without boosting his voice. In general, whether it's Trump or not, if the algorithm could boost fact checked statements only, that would be a win. I think both sides need better exposure to the facts that are typically not seen in their echo-chambers. We need to separate politics and facts if we want to sew this country back together. Facts are apolitical.
Removing him only removed him from your conversation. He is not silenced. Same with banning the Trump reddit forums, what this achieved was to shift them to their own platform where they, no longer hear opposing views or being challenged. And to me it seems worse than ever in their views and speech, shockingly though sometimes.
Using something like the Paradox of tolerance logic is dangerous itself. People love to find justification to their own bad deeds, and this smells like something along those lines to me. The 'I cant be too tolerant or you will use it against me'.
I think the key flaw in the Paradox you quote is "tolerant without limit". I agree if this were true, but society has never had this and never will, it's such an absolute. As fairly standard wherever you live you will have libel and slander laws, rules about promoting things illegal, or encouraging violence.
Overall is a giant problem and is full of grey zones without a perfect answer, but in that I feel its important to steer strongly to the higher principle, be it tolerance or free speech etc, and accept there is cost to higher principles, as sad as that is, but this is far better than allowing a society to swing the other way.
> this smells like something along those lines to me.
> is full of grey zones
That is exactly why it's called a "paradox". We all recognize that we cannot allow tyrannical actors to act unchallenged, but the act of challenging their behavior itself often can be seen as a form of tyranny.
This is why we need an entire system for interpreting and enforcing the laws in a nuanced and careful way. The world is too complex for a simple system of rules to work without consideration to the context of each individual circumstance.
Generally, I agree with what you're saying, though. Sometimes it does feel like all paths lead to a consolidation of power, no matter how well intentioned things began.
No, he's not silenced. He has a newsletter. But he isn't amplified to the heights that he was before either, and less likely to attract new followers. No one's reporting his newsletters.
I'm not looking forward to seeing responses to Trump tweets across social and news media when he returns. There was no escaping it then. The guy adores the limelight from daily controversies and he's going to capitalize on it again.
> Same with banning the Trump reddit forums, what this achieved was to shift them to their own platform where they, no longer hear opposing views or being challenged.
They had actually already moved around 4 months before the ban. The official action was just virtue signaling, it was already dead on reddit (I think their mods had actually locked it and prevented posting).
> Same with banning the Trump reddit forums, what this achieved was to shift them to their own platform where they, no longer hear opposing views or being challenged. And to me it seems worse than ever in their views and speech, shockingly though sometimes.
There is another aspect to this - the benefit to the rest of the world from not being derailed by memetic diarrhea. Trumpism absolutely paralyzed the mainstream discourse by swamping it with nonsense. Even if you were against the nonsense, you ended up having to deal with it, by addressing it or distancing yourself from it. It took much more empathy to read nuance in others' points and not simply write them off as more Trumpist nonsense. Also, see all the times that Trump had a position that had some merit, but yet the opposition Party still staked out a position contrary to it.
The concern isn't whether the Trumpists' dialog grows ever more extreme, but rather whether their numbers grow or diminish. Trumpism is made attractive by real problems, to which it promises simplistic not-even-wrong answers. The fundamental way to make it less attractive is to address those problems, making for a more compelling constructive alternative. This requires being able to debate workable solutions in good faith, without being derailed by the trolling attractor.
Twitter itself may or may not be a platform for constructive debate (their format is horrible and they mostly lucked into the position), but this is the overarching societal dynamic as I see it.
That is largely the media's fault. They covered Trump 24/7 during his entire presidency like it was some sort of addiction. They could have covered anything they wanted (and they ignored numerous newsworthy stories). Perhaps we need a media with the self-discipline to look away from a car crash for 5 minutes.
I'm referring to grassroots discourse and good faith debate. It's awfully hard to discuss approaches to problems and weigh blue-paradigm approaches with red-paradigm approaches when you've got a sizeable contingent who's position is that the whole problem is "fake news" and by the way everyone who thinks it might be real is stupid.
And sure, the same effect caused the media to go crazy. That doesn't mean the entire effect can be lumped onto "the media". Destruction of the memetic environment via disinformation is real in and of itself.
> It took much more empathy to read nuance in others' points and not simply write them off as more Trumpist nonsense. Also, see all the times that Trump had a position that had some merit, but yet the opposition Party still staked out a position contrary to it.
Isn't this an actual instance of "the boy who cried wolf"?
I think anyone pitching the “paradox of tolerance” needs to understand recursion a little better, or perhaps try to understand how their argument looks in a mirror to someone who disagrees with their stated position.
In my opinion that "paradox" is just used as a justification to silence speech of others. All one must do is label their opponent as "intolerant", and all of a sudden all bets are off. And frankly, nowadays more and more perfectly normal behaviour such as simply disagreeing is seen as intolerant.
The problem is exacerbated because 'intolerance' is a buzzword like 'violence' now. It's a label used to attempt to silence or de-platform a dissenting opinion.
The people applying the label are often themselves the perpetrator of intolerance against a valid, and perhaps even mainstream, political viewpoint. Turns out silencing your political opponent is an extremely effective strategy.
> It's a label used to attempt to silence or de-platform a dissenting opinion.
Right. Dissent != intolerance. Something that is just a dissenting opinion would not qualify as something we should be intolerant of, only actual intolerance.
even recursive loops have a point of exit, in this case it would look something like
if ("promotes violence" && "has not been receiving violence") {
print ("this person is intolerant")
}
else if ("has been receiving violence" && "promotes violence") {
print ("this person is oppressed and is trying to oppose that")
}
else {
print ("this person is not within the scope of intolerance")
}
All rights have limits, often rights exist at the expense of other potential rights, our ancestors/predecessors and us have decided what those should be, how they should be handled and what exceptions/allowances should be made. Free speech is one thing but in twitter's particular case is bumps up against property laws as twitter although open to the public is private property. Similarly slander laws exist, and similarly there are other limits of speech that are not protected by the 2nd amendment particularly categories like: incitement, defamation, fraud, obscenity, child pornography, fighting words, and threats. These exclusions always were intended to deal with the intolerant (meaning those who would perform or incite violence unprovoked). Can it be leveraged to silence opposition, yes our laws are not as air tight as they should be especially on the enforcement end of things, but was that the case here? I don't think so, this is a pretty cut and dry case of incitement.
What does it say about the state of our ability to assess what is right or wrong that a requirement for something to be morally right is that it is said in a friendly way?
What happens in the US elections, is more likely to have a bigger impact in your own country than your own country elections. Think of the major strategic implications of a pro-Russia or anti-democratic US administration for example...
My anxiety when reading news online or listening to radio went noticeably down when Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, and I don't live in the US. I entirely agree with you.
I think this is the fault of the news media exploiting peoples anxieties for clicks and engagement. They made everything seem like some kind of catastrophe.
Selective memory or maybe from a place of privilege?
His team called their initial orders their 'shock & awe' strategy and resulted in colleagues not able to come to school+work because they were not allowed back to the US after visiting relatives. You may have been unimpacted, but each such action is real to the people under the boot, and that was just them testing their powers and setting precedent.
That was just the beginning, and as with the Roe v. Wade collapse now playing out, every month of hateful rules, non-handling of COVID, and corrupting the executive & judicial branch, many Americans will be feeling the hangover for literally decades. One of the worst US Presidents in history is known for the Trail of Tears, which killed maybe 1% of those on Trump's watch.
You’re splitting hairs. She’s making a “call to arms”, as mayor of one of the largest cities in the US, over an unsubstantiated claim that the Supreme Court is going to overturn the right to gay marriage, which they are not doing and have not indicated they will do. Seems pretty analogous to me.
Which group is that? Can you name them? Who is their leader? Trump told the Proud Boys specifically to "stand back and stand by". They are an armed group.
You are equating the Proud Boys with the amorphous "LGBTQ+ friends" community, and then saying that the latter "regularly riot". That's not tenable.
I think you are deliberately engaging in bad-faith arguments. You are literally saying "gay people are the same as organized armed militias." In fact, you said it's "worse."
Weird. Members of The Proud Boys (in fact, people they publicly list as their leadership) have been arrested multiple times in my town for drawing weapons (paintbull guns, pepper spray, baseball bats, guns) at protests, firing shots at protests, shooting people at protests.
Don't go on about Antifa as some armed organized group and act like the Proud Boys are "just a bunch of friends disappointed in the direction of society" or some shit. Like you say, "that's not even remotely close to being factual".
The Proud Boys literally have an entire section on their website showing them violently attacking people: https://proudboyspnw.com/fafo/
As others have noted, now you are clearly arguing in bad faith. Nowhere in Lightfoot's tweet did she mention Antifa. In fact, she called out "the LGBTQ+ community" specifically. So how did you jump to "she's telling Antifa to commit violence"? Gay people are Antifa now? You are all over the place.
It's classic whataboutism and a deliberate failure to acknowledge context. I've noticed that a lot of folks on the right ignore context whenever possible.
And of course by typing this out I'm inviting them to say "how dare you I'm not right wing I just use their talking points and tactics and agree with their positions". Ok they won't say the last bits.
Context matters. The LGBTQ+ community is not known for having weapons and for bringing those to the table during debates. It is not known for committing violence either.
This contrasts severely with the crowd that Trump was addressing at the time. Their spaces were filled with calls to weaponization, civil wars and conspiracies against the system itself. The messages were written after people had made threats and refused to engage with the system. This is why it was so dangerous at the time, as we can now see clearly with insight after what ultimately happened.
Lori Lightfoot's call to arms is not happening within that context.
Simply looking at the dictionary will enlighten you: "something that makes people want to take action and get involved in an attempt to deal with a bad situation. He issued a call to arms on behalf of the environment."
Using this example from Macmillan Dictionary, no one is gathering firearms to shoot at the wind. What they are doing is paying attention to the issue and challenging the opposition within the scope of the law and political system.
The LGBTQ+ community is simply lawyering up, making noise about upcoming laws, legally protesting and pushing back using the existing political system. This is usually in the form of strongly written letters to representatives.
All of this is not only legal, it is encouraged behavior in the American political system.
In the end, being LGBTQ+ is not a political identity. It is not "leftist" or "rightist". It is simply the way some people are. Some of them extremist on the left while others are extremist on the right. LGBTQ+ individuals are found on the entire spectrum of American politics.
When we're talking about bans on social media, context doesn't matter. How many stories have you read of someone trying to argue and explain context to overturn a ban, only to have the appeal rejected? (And if it is overturned, it's only because strings were pulled.)
When someone gets banned, a reason might be given, but context never is.
Jack is a just another super-rich guy protecting his interests. He sees the political climate shifting hard right and is acting accordingly. Should there be another mob, he doesn't want to be on the wrong side of it.
I don't see the political climate shifting hard right.
Twitter un-banning Trump isn't an indicator of a political climate shift, although perhaps a social shift, or perhaps simply a one-off random Elon shift.
> I don't see the political climate shifting hard right.
Supreme court repealing Roe v. Wade, Don't say gay bill, restrictions of voter rights, denial of 2020 election loss among top leaders in the GOP, the list goes on...
Not to even to mention the likelihood of conservatives gaining control of the senate and perhaps house in the midterms. This is what a hard right political climate shift looks like.
So, the unbanning is a response to this perceived shift - to get in good with the guys will soon be in power.
I agree with that. But what is happening now isn't the traditional conservatism of 'low taxes, small government'. Look what happened to Liz Chenney, a traditional conservative if anybody can be called one, when she dared to claim Biden won the election.
Liz Cheney belongs to the neoconservative wing of the GOP just like her father and both of the Presidents Bush. All had no compunction with growing the size of government when it came to their policy of regime change abroad.
She didn't get censured for her spending or foreign policies, but because she dared to say out loud that Biden won the election and that the Jan.6 insurrection was a bad thing.
I fully support suspensions, particularly in this case. However, I don't believe a permanent ban for illegal activity is ever warranted, and particularly not in cases where (unfortunately) no guilty verdict was ever given.
I think it's fundamentally not an issue with right/left politics but of subtle philosophical differences over speech, society, and technology. If twitter has a certain form of monopoly on some aspect of public discourse then it's (arguably) in the public good to keep people on it by default. "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer" kind of thinking.
We have had years of these social media "who deserves to get banned" discussions. Not once has it been a good counter-argument to post someone else seemingly breaking rules getting away with it. It rarely, extremely rarely, is a response to someone who actually has power to perform moderation. It implies that the person you are replying to is somehow biased towards something or someone when in reality
a) it's likely they have never heard of this counter-argument case you are linking, and
b) even if they have heard about it they are not a member of SocialMediaSite's content moderation team.
It doesn't imply anything like that. And in case someone takes everything personally, then they must be an extremely dysfunctional person. I am an average guy looking for truth through discussion, not a clinical psychiatrist.
No, of course not, but if President Biden was making those tweets he'd fall under the same criticism as Trump, and if they continued he'd likely be banned too (sans Musk, I mean).
They problem is that Trump also said he wanted the protestors to be peaceful. We don't know what he intended. For you to pretend you do is nonsense.
Now, where Trump is guilt is his actions after the events started. He should have within minutes been calling for it to stop and doing all he could to get police or national guard there to help. This is where I wish the impeachment investigation would have gone, sadly that was a rushed mess.
> Investigators have not uncovered evidence that any official records were tampered with or deleted, and it is well known that Mr. Trump routinely used his personal cellphone, and those of his aides, to talk with other aides, congressional allies and outside confidants, bypassing the normal channels of presidential communication.
So the J6 committee just hasnt' gotten his personal phone records yet, they only had the official Whitehouse call-logs.
The next few paragraphs hint at his culpability, the DOJ should act based on all of the evidence:
> Some of the records that the Jan. 6 committee has received had been ripped to shreds and taped back together, reflecting the former president’s habit of tearing up documents. In addition, he removed more than a dozen boxes of presidential records from the White House when he left office, which the National Archives believes contained classified material, according to a person briefed on the matter.
Not every cause has the same effect, which is one reason why the law often looks into intent. If the speaker intend to incite violence then it's a call for violence, and if it is not then it's a metaphor. It is only by going through the context and the environment of a statement that intent can be subjectively judged.
It goes both way. If we assume intent behind a given action that has occurred, then we apply some form of competence to the person in their ability to turn intent into action. If an action is unintentional then there is some level of incompetence in play. The bigger the outcome and the more obvious we view the action is, the bigger the incompetence from a successful defense of non-intent.
OTOH he also said he'd march with them to the Capitol, which presumably would have served as a form of leadership and given him some potential authority to further discourage violence. Instead, he (at best) decided to blow the whole thing off and leave the angry mob to its own devices for a few hours.
I fully agree he should have gone to the Capitol. That was reckless of him. I also believe he should have said something early than he did. I don't think he blew it off as I don't think he had any intention of going there with the crowd. While he used the words "we" and "let's" I think that was referring to the crowd and it was just the way Trump talks and he did not mean to imply he would go with them.
I don't think that matters. He did not tell them to go into the Capitol and he told them to be peaceful. I don't think you have thought through the outcome of this. It seems like you are saying that a person giving a speech to a crowd is responsible when some people in that crowd along with others not listening to the speech do something bad an hour later. Especially when some people claim they thought they were allowed to do that bad thing because some police opened some doors for them.
He just said be peaceful once while repeatedly suggesting our election had been stolen and encouraging a large crowd to fight back. Meanwhile explicit efforts were being made to prevent the election certification. The subtext is readily apparent and its rather disgusting when people try to weasel in his token use of "peacefully".
To believe that was his intent you have to think Trump was incompetently unaware of the effects of his actions, or that he knew the potential outcome and encouraged it. Both are damning.
I would fine with the criticism of Trump if I felt there was consistency. The problem is there are plenty of politicians and other prominent people have done the same thing. Violence happened in those incidents as well. Almost nobody is advocating for them to be punished or to be held to the same standard. When Trump does it then it is the worst thing in the world. If we decide inflammatory language is not acceptable then fine, but nobody cares when their side does it.
Just to be clear, I am not saying you specifically are not consistent. I do not know what you believe, but until we have the same standards that we as a society agree to I will defend anybody's right to say questionable things so long as they do not call for violence or other crimes.
Bernie Sanders said that Republicans were killing Americans by going after a health care bill. One of his supporters (who also worked on Bernie's campaign) shot a Republican representative. That was inflammatory language and yet nobody holds Bernie to the same standard as they hold Trump to. To use your argument: To believe Bernie's language was not meant to incite violence you have to think Bernie was competently unaware of the effects of his actions, or that he knew the potential outcome and encouraged it. Both are damning.
That is a technicality. You cannot convict the President of anything (he controls enforcement of the laws, has pardon power, etc.). The senate would need to impeach him, remove him from office (which would never happen due to Republican opposition), then convict him as a private citizen (which would never happen due to political norms).
He hasn’t been president for a year already. Yet no one even tried to bring him to court because of anything; all I see are some keyboard warriors who don’t get how the presumption of innocence works.
He is not guilty just because some random comment says it. He is only guilty when a court says so.
That is false. The President enjoys immunity for many actions taken as President, but not all actions can be considered official, and not all actions are immunized.
State charges, especially committed before taking federal office, are certainly possible.
The fact that he still has enough political power to avoid execution for sedition, or any responsibility whatsoever for this crime, does not have any effect on the truth value of my statement.
Man it's a scary state of affairs when people unflinchingly support execution of a President that literally didn't incite a riot. And that they think it was a genuine attempt at a coup.
All I'm saying is, I think it's pretty obvious which side has most of the guns in this day in age. I don't recall seeing many armed that day. Actually I don't recall hearing about any. Except for, of course, all the obvious undercover agents watching it unfold. Who in their right mind attempts a coup without arms? I guess by having the police let them in the doors?
"let them in" after they had already attacked officers and pushed through barriers. Please don't argue about this event if you are so unaware of what actually happened.
1. Trump attempted to use fake electors to overturn the election in his favor. [1]
2. The wife of a Supreme Court Justice pursued efforts to overturn the election. [2]
3. There were tons of communications between senior members and the Trump admin on how to overturn the election. [3]
4. The Oath Keepers, an armed militia group, stood by on Jan 6 ready to "swoop in" on a signal. [4]
5. And of course, the President of the United States of America told his followers that "if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore". And "We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved." And "Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about … We will stop the steal." And "Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong.”" And then told them he would march to the Capitol with them. [5]
Regardless of the legal technicalities that do or don't enable it, executing or imprisoning former heads of state is counterproductive if the goal is to ensure continued peaceful transitions of power.
Lots of people deny the 2000 election. Lots of people deny the 2016 election. Lots of people deny the 2020 election. Why is denial of 2020 worse than any of the others? Stacy Abrams is still claiming her election was stolen. Denial of elections is quite common in the US.
* mumbles something about 'lots of people' are not the POTUS in the face of countless, countless court hearings to confirm that fraud didn't take place at scale and the result was valid.
* opines about the effect these continual denials have on a rabid, angry ... loser ... voter base.
* the result? Jan 6.
If you can't see that, good luck. It's f@cking so simple.
