Instead of debating whether social media platforms should or shouldn't have silenced the president, and what their role was in inciting the crowds to "insurrection", shouldn't we be discussing instead how to completely remove them from the political sphere? Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries. Social media platforms should never have been allowed to become the arbiters of democracy.
Most people on Hacker News are entrepreneurs that run their own private businesses. Social media platforms are not some sort of public utility. Social media platforms are private businesses owned by private individuals who can choose who they want to let in and who they want to kick out just like any restaurant or bar or concert hall. If you dislike who a social media platform allows or does not allow, just use a different one. For example, many Trump supporters use parler... A platform which is known to kick off liberal voices.
Or better yet, just set up your own blog on your own host and do whatever you want.
Turns out the state has the power to regulate private businesses, and when a business has so much power that it can unilaterally influence (even threaten) democratic process, the state ought to regulate it (or else it regulates the state).
I'm not an expert, but I believe the original "trusts" that spurred antitrust laws were so powerful that they were able to significantly influence government. As I understand it, this was (one of?) the motivation(s) for antitrust legislation.
For internet services in general (and most other non-broadcast communications), free speech laws in many jurisdictions prevent most (or all) types of content regulation.
Right, but if an individual spreads misinformation, child pornography, piracy, threats, harassment, defamation, etc they are liable. Social networks are uniquely not responsible for the content that they curate--they enjoy the best of both worlds, and they oughtn't. If their curation is "speech" they should be legally accountable to for their speech like the rest of us are. There's precedent here with telecoms--they're free from scrutiny because they're just dumb pipes.
This is one conceivable kind of legislation that doesn't run afoul of the first amendment. Another approach might be to require social networks to interoperate so consumers can choose between different networks. I should be able to leave Twitter without leaving my network. In this way, Twitter (et al) loses a lot of its power and thus its ability to threaten democracy.
No. CDA section 230 covers all online services. There is no special social media exception.
The only way for the service to be a dumb pipe is to not involve any kind of promotion or ranking algorithms to it, other than spam filtering. In other words, you can't have a dynamic high quality forum that is open to the public, with focus on the best content displayed first, and also be a dumb pipe. To prevent all moderation and ranking based on quality and opinion would quickly turn most sites into pure trash.
It is unreasonable to apply such regulations to anything but the actual dumb pipe, the internet connection (net neutrality).
Federation is indeed a much better choice. Allows the host to still set a quality standard on their server, and is at the same time free from gatekeepers. See Mastodon, Matrix, etc. Go to whichever host will accept you, talk to anybody willing to talk to you, and bans only kick you off specific servers.
> No. CDA section 230 covers all online services. There is no special social media exception.
Pedantry. My point was that these online services enjoy protections ordinary citizens (and other institutions) don't enjoy: they can choose what information people see even if it is illegal or factually incorrect and they are protected from any consequences.
> The only way for the service to be a dumb pipe is to not involve any kind of promotion or ranking algorithms to it, other than spam filtering. In other words, you can't have a dynamic high quality forum that is open to the public, with focus on the best content displayed first, and also be a dumb pipe. To prevent all moderation and ranking based on quality and opinion would quickly turn most sites into pure trash.
Right, so if Twitter (or whomever) wants to remain relevant (not become "pure trash" as you artfully put it), they need to own the consequences of their content curation. For the purpose of public good, I don't care much whether Twitter becomes an irrelevant dumb pipe or a responsible--and thus valuable--public service. Note that we needn't accept the law as-is; we could also change the exception from "dumb pipe" to "transparency of curation" to introduce a third option: Twitter can curate content how it likes but it must divulge its process.
> Federation is indeed a much better choice. Allows the host to still set a quality standard on their server, and is at the same time free from gatekeepers. See Mastodon, Matrix, etc. Go to whichever host will accept you, talk to anybody willing to talk to you, and bans only kick you off specific servers. No regulation needed.
How do you get to a federated world without regulation? Do you think 2021 or 2022 is going to be The Year of Mastodon like every year hereto has been The Year of The Linux Desktop? I.e., the "Free Market" is going to pack up and leave their existing networks on Twitter et al and move to federated alternatives? Regulation is needed to ensure fair competition; to prevent social media companies from holding your social network hostage ("if you want to communicate with your friends, you must go through us and whatever shady agreements we require you to make, and we may not even hold up our end of those agreements").
To be clear, these solutions have various tradeoffs--my point isn't that any or all of these are the right solution, but merely that if I can think of half a dozen approaches that bypass free speech laws then we should be able to work something out.
We are in bad shape if the best defense one can give of the current media is to call it a more efficient version of the worst period in modern journalistic history.
The old newspaper empires typically operated at the national level, rather than global level (even the Wolff/Reuters/Havas telegraph cartel operated within specific geographical boundaries). Similarly, for-profit companies with quasi-governmental powers operated within specific spheres of influence, plus they were more overt in their powers, e.g. the East India Company had a royal charter giving it the ability to wage war within their territories. Social media platforms, on the other hand, have been directly implicated in bloodshed and interfering with democratic elections all over the world for years, e.g. the Arab Spring and ensuing civil wars, foreign bot farms influencing election results, etc., all under the guise of being innocuous platforms e.g. for sharing funny cat pictures. Not suggesting they should be banned, and I don't think we should just give up and say it is too hard a problem to fix. Just finally accept that social media platforms are dangerous weapons, and treat them as such. Many countries already have good legislation around mixing politics and conventional media, we just need the the legislation to catch up with new media before too much further damage is done.
And in a way it was true; it did aid in destroying the world as it was known. But we inhabit the world that emerged from those struggles, so the victors write the history (and print it). If a new political regime were to arise from or through, say, twitter and overthrow all prior established regimes, the rectitude of that technology would be just as reaffirmed through equivalent hagiography.
Both KGB and Stazi did fully control their citizens. Today there's no any serious technical restriction to get compromising information on anyone or better to say on everyone from any county. So, almost total control - see Trump, Farage, LePan, AFD, etc.
The report warns that social media “are now tilting dangerously toward illiberalism” as more governments and “unscrupulous partisan operatives” use social media for repressive purposes. These include not only malign propaganda campaigns at home and abroad, but also growing government use of social media for mass surveillance. “As a result of these trends,” Freedom House reports, “global internet freedom declined for the ninth consecutive year in 2019.
Arguably the curation and format, and perhaps the incentives. Twitter optimized for angry reactions and misunderstandings, deliberately, to drive clicks. Lately more traditional media does the same thing.
100% agree with this perspective: "history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes"
The number of voices on twitter is the rhyme: Hearst and a small number of people controlled the message back then. Twitter bears responsibility, but they are ultimately not editorializing everybody all the time.
Reading this, I think it's worth quoting Hannah Arendt. At this point in history, her words are deafening relevant:
> “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
The failure of Twitter isn't active editorializing or the lack thereof.
The failure of Twitter is to not provide the necessary affordances in its design, its functionality, its business model, its values, its policies, its mission and its vision that allows a userbase of over a billion people to self-govern itself in a way that helps prevent what happened yesterday.
... and that's absolutely, undeniably a failure to think about the consequences of the product that Twitter has pushed into the world for the past 15 years.
... and it's not only a failure. It's a failure lost in it's own pure and utter banality.
Twitter isn't free of from criticisms. It's not a force of nature or the universe that disrupted lives in unfortunate ways. It's a product designed with a clear intent by humans for other humans. And therein lies the responsibility of Twitter, and everyone who provides a soapbox for others, to which it should be held accountable.
History doesn't repeat itself unless we repeat - remember, reflect, rehash, re-tell - history. And we do that from a place of empathy and understanding. Everything else is inconsequential.
> The failure of Twitter is to not provide the necessary affordances in its design, its functionality, its business model, its values, its policies, its mission and its vision that allows a userbase of over a billion people to self-govern itself in a way that helps prevent what happened yesterday.
Assuming that line of thinking, where'e the root cause, and when should it have been identified?
I've been on twitter since literally day two (I'm user 1018 or something like that). It was a farce back in the day: people talking about cats is my clearest memory. Ev posted on the Odeo blog and I checked it out. I remember the fail whale days.
At that point, it was a struggling start up with a start up tech stack.
At what point specifically did Twitter jump the shark and should have reinvented itself? It's an honest question and not rhetorical. It's easy to Monday morning quarterback its entire existence and call for self governance for a corporate product. It's harder to point to where and when and how that should have happened.
If we can have _that_ discussion, we can inform future twitters, which I agree is a very worthwhile cause. Otherwise, your comments sound eloquent, but ultimately are devoid of any utility.
Edit: Also, just now noticed your username... the analogy was not intentional in that regard. :-P
> I've been on twitter since literally day two (I'm user 1018 or something like that). It was a farce back in the day: people talking about cats is my clearest memory. Ev posted on the Odeo blog and I checked it out. I remember the fail whale days.
I've been there since early 2007.
> Assuming that line of thinking, where'e the root cause, and when should it have been identified?
Strip away the trimmings and the technology of any platform - including Twitter - and what do you have?
One or several hosts organizing an event, opening the doors and inviting people to join.
It doesn't matter if there are 5, 500, 5 million or 500 million attendees. As soon as you open those doors, you bear a responsibility to ensure that the event doesn't devolve in abuse and violence.
In the digital world, that means you think about community governance, including moderation. It also means that, as more and more people join, you are aware of the diversity in opinions they bring. It means you delegate moderation, but - more importantly - you design, evolve and build your platform in a way that helps people.
It also - most importantly - means you actually listen and acknowledge the feedback people give.
Literally none of this was new. Digital forums, chatrooms, first gen social media like MySpace, newsgroups, mailing lists and comment sections already existed in 2005. The challenges and the expertise to manage an online discussions existed at the time.
Even before that, the challenges, pitfalls and dangers of providing a soapbox to an audience - any audience - were all too well known.
> It's harder to point to where and when and how that should have happened.
From day one.
I've read Nick Bilton's Hatching Twitter. The founders of Twitter had lofty ambitions about re-inventing the Web. But as soon as Twitter started gaining a bit of traction, they devolved in arguments, rows and petty politics.
I've seen how the platform re-invented itself a few times. I've been disillusioned with the subsequent redesigns. Most notably, how Twitter all but entirely closed it's API towards 3rd party developers, killing off a budding, vibrant ecosystem of enthusiasts that did build tools that filled in holes which Twitter didn't fill.
The reality of the matter is that few people - including Twitter - have been up front about what Twitter has always been: a plain business just like the next. With a clear profit motive. Never a community "for the people, by the people".
Twitter has been a business from the day it was conceived. It started off as a product within a business context (Odeo). It was conceived within a context where any idea that caught the slightest of attention immediately became shoe-horned in a business model from the get-go.
Never mind the consequences, the impact or long term strategies.
> If we can have _that_ discussion, we can inform future twitters, which I agree is a very worthwhile cause.
Oh, but we do inform "future twitters".
It's called education, schooling and upbringing. It's in passing on values and morals to future generations. It's instilling in younger generations basic notions about respect, empathy, learning to listen, restraint, civics and so on.
Twitter doesn't equate nor facilitate the public debate. It has commoditized the public debate and leveraged it to sell marketing and advertising services.
All the lofty talk from @Jack about nothing intruding into the public debate simply doesn't do away with the fact that actively investing in a platform that allows healthy community growth has always been seen for what it was: a cost that was perceived to outweigh the benefits.
That's the banality of evil at it's heart. Simply not recognizing that your own actions have very real consequences in the real world. Even when it's pointed out plainly to you.
There are no ways to separate political from non political discourse. You can only remove social media from the political sphere by removing social media, period.
You could, however, try to develop a legal and moral framework for acceptable social media behavior (meaning the way the network itself works, not users' behavior). The particularities that make extreme content rise to the top should be banned/discouraged, rather than embraced in the race for engagement.
Social media makes information available instantly everywhere and there is always someone wanting to believe any speech.
If there is someone wanting to believe the earth is flat and triangular you will find him fast now. What could take months with massive people gatherings and paper press 100 years ago it can be done within minutes now.
Instead of banning maybe educating people on how to consume information could be a way to start. I guess it is almost impossible to educate everybody but it has empirically worked for me and my close environment, after years of educating some of my older relatives I have been able to at least make them read the links before sharing them.
> There are no ways to separate political from non political discourse
Most large companies (especially in regulated industries) have strict social media policies, e.g. preventing employees from performing company business via their personal social media accounts, with penalties for serious breaches being disciplinary action up to and including dismissal, i.e. it is possible to separate company business from non-company business. Why not the same for those working in the political sphere?
Sure, you can ban politicians from engaging in social networks, but that's far smaller proposal than removing the connection between social media and politics.
Taking twitter away from congressmen won't stop superpatriotsforbaldeagles.ru from distributing political propaganda, or random people being fed extreme media each inside their bubble.
The issue is inflammatory content spreading like wildfire, and direct intervention from politicians themselves is just tiny drop in the ocean.
> Why not the same for those working in the political sphere?
What does this actually mean? Are you trying to ask politicians not to engage in politics? News organisations? Billionaires? Foreign intelligence services? Asking for legal restrictions on who's allowed to speak about what?
Just wait until you ask them to define what exactly 'politics' is. You'll either get no response or it'll boil down to 'the things I don't like.'
And to clarify, this is actually a really important question because it predicates the entire discourse of separating social media and networks from politics.
There are ways to limit the influence, such has prohibiting elected officials from maintaining "official" accounts where they announce and do the public's business on the social media platforms.
Also making some of the support the social media platform clearly have for some candidates as "in kind" political contributions.
The world would be a better place if FB and Twitter did not exist. People often ask when and where did it go wrong, well it went wrong when Twitter and FB came into existence.
> Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries
Newspapers has this power before. Arguablying more so as there are Twitter alternatives and people can move platforms quickly as we saw with reddit and thedonald.win
I guessing it was easier to control before as there were narrow corridors of power to owners/govt.
Defamation lawsuits. Right now, a bunch of people can tweet "John Doe (some public figure) beats his wife" with no verification, and Twitter keeps the tweets up, and doesn't get in trouble when John Doe's life is ruined by the false accusations.
What's more, media can then report "John Doe is allegedly a domestic abuser," citing the tweets as evidence that there are allegations that John Doe is a domestic abuser. You see this pattern with pizza gate (some dumb social media posts getting picked up by Republican news), and with Kyle Rittenhouse (dumb, false twitter posts picked up by left-leaning news). In the latter case, the news outlets have been getting sued for defamation because the reporting was damaging and so demonstrably false.
Section 230 protection for these platforms erodes all standards of truth for news.
Libel of public figures in the US has an extremely high bar. It needs to be proven that a statement was known to be false or the publication was reckless in deciding to publish the information without investigating whether it was accurate. (Initially established in New York Times v. Sullivan.)
You can of course sue for any reason but winning is another matter.
(It's easier if the defendant is not a public figure, but still, in general, it's relatively hard to win libel suits in the US.)
"John Doe" above is not a public figure - your parent's point is that social media enjoys all the advantages and power of newspapers without bearing any of the responsibility to strive for truthfulness.
In fact IMO it's even worse - unlike newspapers which would at least be embarrassed by blatant mis-reporting, sensationalist and fantastical stories are a major source of profits for social media, and they've got incentives to encourage and promote them.
Yes, most mainstream publications do strive for truthfulness (fortunately) but it's not really a requirement for 1st amendment protection and I'm sure we can think of fairly mainstream news outlets that don't let the truthfulness responsibility cramp their style too much.
Consider what social media would look like without Section 230. Could it even exist? It would need automated tools to verify the accuracy of millions of posts in real time. I doubt they could be built even with a massive budget. If you rely on user reports of inaccuracy, you'll need a huge staff to deal with everything, and will be bombarded by trolls acting in bad faith.
Ironically, given all his complaining, if Section 230 didn't exist, Twitter would have no choice but to ban Trump. He'd be an absolute nightmare in terms of liability.
Furthermore, it's not just about social media which didn't even exist in its current form in 1996 (the Web barely did). Rather Section 230 was more focused at the time on things like ISPs and hosting providers. So it's not just about Twitter and Facebook. It's also about things like individual web pages.
If you have a huge firehose of opposing opinions, and you choose to censor 1% of the opinions of one side versus the other, you have effectively become a newspaper with an editorial board.
The only way to avoid this is to permit ALL content (which we have decided is untenable), or somehow precisely censor as much on one side as the other (which is impossible).
I don't see what "sides" have to do with this. You have a policy of what is acceptable content or not and apply it uniformly.
If one "side" is breaking rules about promoting violence, and the other is not, they are not being censored or repressed- they are just breaking rules and their content will be removed.
In the US we seem to feel its ingrained that there has to be two (and only two) binary "sides" in opposition to one another. This is the minority case around the world. Things get a lot thornier when you have a whole bunch of different sides that tend to be focused around a narrow view of issues.
Correct, and it was recognized how important their role was, there were/are laws specifically covering what they could say about political subjects, whether they had to grant opposing views a platform, etc.
None of that exists for the newer platforms today.
Personally, I wish Twitter was one audio-only party line.
Two minutes of listening to a million people yelling their thoughts in real rime would reveal exactly what is happening there - and what a complete waste of time it is.
> Instead of debating whether social media platforms should or shouldn't have silenced the president, and what their role was in inciting the crowds to "insurrection", shouldn't we be discussing instead how to completely remove them from the political sphere?
No.
> Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries.
Yeah, that's really not true, even if you specifically limit it to media firms (e.g., Hearst at its height), and ignore, e.g., extractive/colonial firms like oil companies, United Fruit Company, and the various East India Companies, and also ignore much of history before the modern period, when there was no real public/private distinction, and the things we now think of as public functions were overtly private property rights exercised, quite often, for personal profit.
> Social media platforms should never have been allowed to become the arbiters of democracy.
They aren't the arbiters of democracy, only of their own platforms. Just like other media companies.
> Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries.
Newspapers have always had this power, the difference now is it's on the internet instead of print. Once TV's became common place the evening news also had this power. This has always been how things worked the difference now is the reach is larger and the turnaround time is faster.
Im paraphrasing but theres this principle in aviation that every rule is paid for in blood or something to that effect. The same is often brought up with regards to automotive safety and really anytime engineering meets public safety, but I digress.
Point being is that the social media experiment and the wild west days of the internet writ large has run its course. We’ve had our fun and money has been made and lost and made again and again and again and the writing is on the wall I’m afraid.
If history is any evidence the gravy train is about to come to a glaring and disastrous end. Legislation will be passed, examples will be made by the powers at be and society will look back through the lens of history at these past 30-40 years as a cautionary tale.
To your point:
There is already a huge body of law that exists that would not take much retooling to apply. Held back by the voluminous pedantic arguments entertained ad nauseam. However the blood is there in droves and now the powers at be have had the chaos special delivered on a silver platter. Its one thing for us to comment and argue in the safe confines of our little luxury bubbles the internet provides, its another thing to watch in casual horror when the death toll numbers get so large as to be incomprehensible to many and then continue those same arguments to no effect. But make no mistake reality is what refuses to go away when you choose to stop believing in it and the reality is that for the first time as of yesterday the powers at be have had their bubbles burst as a result of their collective negligence and blood has been delivered as a direct result to their door.
As if 350k people dead isn't enough, theres a tyrannical despot once again guilty of treason on national tv for all to see that this time has literally instigated a coup with blood on congress floors as a result. Fueled specifically by social media and the internet. Sure things may have seemed ephemeral and hard to legislate before because hey its the internet and its on a cute little screen, but no more.
I expect the laws to be written, applied and enforced the same way they always have been. And I expect the piles of anti- trust cases to encounter not much friction now and as for social media... i expect that it will be fine as long as it doesn't get too big and crosses that pernicious threshold where it ever again is able to be a real threat to the powers at be.
I think his point isn't that politics are being discussed on a private platform, it's that the most up-to-date, official communication channel of the President is an account on a private social network instead of on government-owned infrastructure.
But the problem is really one of misuse of the bully-pulpit rather than the the fact it is private. If trump had his own blog on the whitehouse.gov site, hosted on government servers and still posted the stuff he does, would it be the same? I'm sure plenty of folks would proxy the material to various outlets including the twitter.
I think the problem of the president saying things many find unacceptable is separate from the private vs public platform thing.
In this case I am purely talking about the latter - the fact that to keep up with what the president says I have to agree to a private company's terms of service, privacy policy (which is against my interest) and have to put up with my personal data being exploited for advertising, the advertising itself and various dark patterns.
> shouldn't we be discussing instead how to completely remove them from the political sphere?
I don't think so. The analogy that comes to mind is the idea of letting kids play outside. People try to justify today's overprotective culture by bringing up things like cars (they existed back in the 70s too) or candy-wielding abductors (really?) or whatever, but the overall theme is this pervasive idea that we can't handle scary things (be it the outdoors or media megacorps) and therefore we should be artificially shielded from them.
Instead, wouldn't it be better to teach critical thinking in school such that when you're faced with the realities of the world, you have at least some preparation? The idea of imparting civic responsibility principles from a young age seems to work well for example with classroom cleaning duties in Japan.
I think there are many more cars on the road today, and I suspect they are more dangerous to pedestrians (new cars are generally more powerful, so tend to accelerate to dangerous speeds on small streets. Not to even start on smartphones).
At least in the US, the danger from newer cars isn't more powerful engines, it's that cars are bigger and tend to weigh more than they did 50 years ago. Some of it is quality-of-life changes (AC compressors are heavy), some of it is a trade-off made for safety or crashworthiness, but a big chunk of it is because Americans have largely opted for big cars -- SUVs, pickup trucks, minivans -- to the point that the 3 major American auto manufacturers basically don't sell anything smaller than a family-size sedan[0].
[0] As someone who loves smaller hatchbacks, this really grinds my gears.
I really doubt the difference between a 1700 lb (1980 honda civic) and a 5600 lb (2020 escalade) vehicle matters that much in a collision with a pedestrian. from a conservation of momentum standpoint, the 1700 lb car already weighs so much more than a person that the additional weight from a modern SUV has little effect. either way, the vehicle plows straight through with minimal loss of velocity. the bigger issue with SUVs is the clearance; a pedestrian is much more likely to be run over by and SUV, rather than thrown over the hood of a small car.
That represents a greater danger in vehicle-vehicle collisions, but I doubt it's anywhere near as a large an effect for vehicle-pedestrian collisions.
It's possible, though, that the larger vehicles represent a greater danger due to poorer visibility. I don't have enough experience driving a contemporary truck or SUV to know the driver's experience, but I do know that, when parked along the street, they present a serious visibility problem for pedestrians compared to coupes and sedans.
since the 1970s, the number of cars per person in the USA has increased by ~50%, the number of people has increased by ~60%, and, vehicle miles traveled per capita had (previous to 2020) nearly doubled.
> new cars are generally more powerful, so tend to accelerate to dangerous speeds on small streets.
Yes and no and but...
Yes - Broadly speaking most new cars are more powerful than they were in the late 70s and early 80s
No - Before the gas crisis we has a much larger lust for big powerful engines.
But - In the last 20 years especially there has been a mandated (i.e. NHSTA/etc) effort to make vehicles 'less harmful' to pedestrians in case of an impact. You can see some of this in the changes to front fascias/bumpers.
>No - Before the gas crisis we has a much larger lust for big powerful engines.
>But - In the last 20 years especially there has been a mandated (i.e. NHSTA/etc) effort to make vehicles 'less harmful' to pedestrians in case of an impact. You can see some of this in the changes to front fascias/bumpers.
You hit on some of the complexity here. Cars are actually much quicker now. In the 1950s, a V8 police car made 85-150 horsepower. So, the bigger engines prior to the 70s were quite slow compared to cars today. As you note, the speed gains must be partially offset (fully?) by the advances in safety: tires, anti-lock brakes, pedestrian-friendly bumpers, and more.
in the 1950s, yes, but much quicker cars were available in the 60s. there were chevy caprice four-door sedans that made 425 hp and did 0-60 in around six seconds. that's not far off modern hot hatches (although I suspect the ones with 425 hp were probably less affordable at the time). it was possible to make plenty of power back then; it was mainly the weight that held those vehicles back. the specific model I'm looking at weighed 4100 lbs!
Your analogy is strange because our society has opted to punish parents for letting kids play outside unsupervised the way they themselves did, while in the case of social platforms, it has opted for individual responsibility and no sanctions. Unless you’re saying we went wrong with the kids and now we should not do the same for adults. In which case I would say that letting kids play unsupervised is an individual risk but speech and organizations have large and exponentially spreading emergent effects, so if you have the profit motive you’re going to end up with certain, shall we say, exacerbated divisions in this country.
> you’re saying we went wrong with the kids and now we should not do the same for adults
Well, I'm not defending that position so much as I am parroting that crowd's idea that unsupervised childhoods were better.
I think in both cases there's an element of prescribing the loss of options in favor of some notion of greater good. Whether it is a warranted trade-off or not, I don't know, but the Benjamin Franklin quote comes to mind: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"
Critical thinking is taught in schools. When I think back far enough to my daughter's elementary school education, teachers were trying to develop it by at least 4th grade (9-10yo). Starting the next year, she had classes in civics that continued through to high school (14-18yo) where she is now. As I write this comment, her world history class is discussing yesterday's events in DC in a point/counter-point fashion.
Despite the effort to develop critical thinking skills, a small but not insignificant number of students parrot what they watch on questionable news outlets.
sort of a tangent, but I wonder if the emphasis on proper scholarly citations gets in the way of the actual critical thinking part. when I was in middle/high school, most of the teachers seemed to care more about us following the APA/MLA format perfectly and using proper "authoritative" sources than whether our arguments actually made sense. I was never very efficient at making bibliographies or sifting through academic papers, so I felt a perverse incentive to cite as few sources as possible.
the one exception was my teacher for a public policy elective. he considered any reasonable newspaper to be an acceptable source, and accepted a simple footnote with a link as a citation. the catch was that he would actually follow the links and dock points if we had misinterpreted the source or failed to address the source's bias. I recall that students actually wrote some good papers in that class...
Her teachers tend more toward the exception you described. They have conversations about the quality of sources. Teachers definitely follow some links to make sure students aren't bullshitting. She was definitely introduced to the mechanics of putting a bibliography together. But I think the emphasis is on looking at issues from different sides. I remember thinking that it sounded like my friend's recollection of law school where he had to make arguments from different points of view.
To be fair a couple of those platforms are being prosecuted for anti-trust issues. It's kinda weird how the final straw was over VR periphals rather than corporate takeover of the public square but I guess the US just has weird priorities
The problem is the choices of individuals. It's not appropriate to blame a third party for the actions of an individual. If you riot or destroy something it is your fault and your fault alone. This is a major problem for our country, it's easier to be a victim than to take responsibility, and there is an entire subset of our population (the woke left) that supports this attitude.
> privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence
They are simply a middle man between foreign agencies and domestic users. Foreign countries really do exploit all those platforms for their own interests.
The violating content they removed was trump repeating the same stolen election crud he's been saying for a month and then __urging the protesters to go home peacefully, preserve law and order, etc__.
For those that don't want to play a video this is an unabridged transcript:
"I know your pain. I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us, it was a landslide election and everyone knows it especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anybody hurt. It's a very tough period of time, there has never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us, from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election but we can't play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home, we love you, you're very special, you've seen what happens you've seen the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace."
I was watching a live stream from the mob and the protesters (the buffalo costume guy, in fact) were trying to get other protesters to leave on the basis of trumps message and people were believing the claim was fake because twitter restricted sharing so the only way to see it was to directly go to the page.
The insurrectionists were there because they falsely believe the election was stolen, and half of that video was him saying "yep, you guys are correct". He's done this shit before where he vigorously fans the flames but then gives a half-assed concessionary call for peace that his followers know to ignore.
They were there in the first place because of his message
Also the video wasn't the only thing removed either; the other was this tweet:
> These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!
That message is self-inconsistent, but not actually that unusual. A key plank of religious tolerance is people peacefully accepting they are governed by, potentially, literal heretics. Or religious crazies in the case of the atheists.
It is possible to simultaneously believe that the election results are illegitimate and to live peacefully in society. It requires a bit more mental flexibility than I like to give myself, but there is precedent.
The call to action (go home with love & in peace) trumps the frame.
But that's not what he's saying. He's not making any sort of transition or explanation for why people should go home. It's clearly tacked on afterwards, and the protestors know it. Then they can blame it on "the deep state." He's sandwiching go home with two statements legitimizing what the protestors are doing.
Even if you believe it to be true, starting the conversation by telling people that their opinions are illegitimate is a bad first step when asking them to do something.
This actually shows a difference in how fascists and nationalists use words versus how the rest of us use words. For most people words are a truthful declaration of intents and ideas. But fascists often use words for a different purpose. They don't use them in their common meanings, but rather as tools to inflame and to denigrate others.
Take use of the word "socialism" or "nationalism." I've seen a disturbing tendency on the right to call anything they don't like "socialist." Nothing makes that clearer than Trump's call to the Cuban expatriates in Florida to vote against the "communist" Joe Biden.
If you know anything about Biden's policies you would recognize them as pretty standard Progressive policies. I have never once heard him discuss taking private property and distributing it as a public good. He's not once talked about erasing private enterprise. He is manifestly not communist. So the only conclusion I can draw is that Trump is using "communist" to mean "person you don't like" so he can fan the flames.
Given that, I don't think we can take anything he says at face value. This is actually a common tendency on the right, and it's why they're so good at fanning the flames. They see what our words mean and they disregard that meaning.
I very much dislike it when people see conflict and automatically assume symmetry. If someone pries open my car, pulls me out and starts beating me, and a cop comes over and sees "a fight" and arrests us both, is that fair?
In the same way, you say that there are two "radical opinions" about voter fraud. This is false. There is only one radical opinion. It is similar to a flat earther claiming that schools need to "teach the controversy". No. They do not.
Regarding the current conflict, there is deep asymmetry here. Trump has been claiming election fraud prior to the election since he was elected. When the election finally happened, Trump had over 60 chances to show evidence. Hefiled and lost over 60 lawsuits, including ones in front of judges he appointed, and in front of 3 supreme court justices he nominated. They all took his claims seriously, looked at them, and rejected them. These were his own appointees. That's where it should end.
To continue to believe that "the election was stolen" under these circumstances is the only extreme view. Trump, and his GOP/Fox enablers, have been pushing this view as fact, and his followers have acted consistently, and violence has ensued. The violence, and the treason, falls squarely with them.
And if you have any doubt that Trump's motive is about anything other than Trump wanting to keep power, then listen to that phone call to Georgia's (Republican) Secretary of State.
But yes, I'm tired of hearing people say, when talking about Trump, that "both sides are bad" and "all politicians suck". No. I get the desire to avoid conflict, but those statements are simply false. Trump has broken his oath to the constitution, repeatedly and egregiously, and his misdeeds have not been matched. There is no symmetry here, there is only a traitor-in-chief and his cronies.
> Trump has been claiming election fraud prior to the election since he was elected.
Actually it is even more damning than that, Trump has been claiming election fraud since before he was elected in 2016. He was ramping up to make a claim the election was stolen until just after he beat Hilary legitimately.
There was no "hundreds of thousands of votes suddenly going for Biden", you made that up. There is a count of votes, and that count of votes led into one direction as they counted more votes. And sometimes that count climbs higher at specific moment in time based on a county that had not reported that starts reporting, etc. But it doesn't matter, it's only if you look at it at a specific moment. If you wait for all the votes to be counted at the end, you have a final tally there is no sudden change of votes in one direction or another. What you're saying is pure fabrication.
The comment is flagged so I can't see what they were referring to, but I'm guessing it's the counts for Wisconsin and Michigan, which around 4am did indeed spike a few hundred thousand votes only for Biden, exactly enough to push it from "clear loss" to "close race".
Chances are they're forgetting that Trump actively discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, which along with the fact that most states counted mail-in votes last meant that most Trump votes were counted early while most Biden votes were counted late.
This meant that the intermediate results early on pointed to Trump and then shifted to Biden.
This effect was predicted in the very beginning of the pandemic! As soon as we knew mail-in voting would many up such a large fraction of votes, this was obvious, and many (including me) anticipated that Trump and others would make up propaganda about this, or even try to stop the vote counting early to stop the mail-in votes from getting counted.
The "red mirage" predictions were for over the course of the week as postmarked-pre-election ballots arrived late and got counted over the course of the week, not a mass-dump all at once. So no, there was no warning for this.
And even with encouraging in-person voting, the dump was 99-100% Biden, that's the suspicious part. No way all Trump supporters voted in-person, even with the urging.
> the dump was 99-100% Biden, that's the suspicious part
Do you have any extraordinary evidence to back this extraordinary claim?
I kept a spreadsheet of the votes in Michigan as they came in and I don't see any dumps that were 99-100% Biden.
Also, the "Red Mirage" also was a big thing in states that weren't allowed by law to start counting the mail-in ballots until the day of the election (MI, PA were two of these states.) So they ended up prioritizing counting the in-person ballots on election day, and got to the backlog of mail ballots after the polls closed.
This was all a very easily predictable, simple result of the election laws in the states, and it was predicted. None of this was surprising to anyone who paid attention prior to election day.
To your mail in ballot claims, My family and many of my extended family and friends in MI used the mail in ballot process. I also noticed on social media many people posting pictures of their ballots. On Election Day, Driving around, I did not see my local pole have a line (which were longer due to social distancing) or anything like I saw in 2016. This is what makes me believe the highly concentrated Biden ballot dumps were more than suspicious, anything over 75% should be considered very carefully for fraud.
Nothing in that graph indicates a “99% Biden” vote dump. The steep vertical line you see in blue is painting over another steep vertical line in red, indicating trump also got a significant number of votes in that dump (although much less then Biden. I’d estimate something like 75% Biden from eyeballing it). If it was a 99% dump, the red line would be seen continuing on its original path to the right.
I live in Oakland County, MI and the area is mostly Trump. Many more trump signs out than Biden. I also lived in Detroit until March and it is extremely under populated.
Almost none of the districts were 100% Biden, with a few exceptions - districts which are historically democratic leaning, AND in which journalists literally could not find one single person claiming to have voted for Trump when they investigated these numbers.
And I have not heard of any example of mail-in batches going 100% to Biden.
There's statistics over the split in mail-in votes. There's like 2x more democratic mail-in votes than republican mail-in votes.
Can you point us to any evidence of actual election fraud? If so, what do you make of the courts not being clear about the facts as you see them? Was this evidence simply not part of the tens of lawsuits that were filed or are you suggesting that the courts are simply complicit in this stolen election? Or is it something else?
> Can you point us to any evidence of actual election fraud?
I certainly can. There is an audio recording of a sitting president asking, then begging, then threatening a Secretary of State to create illegitimate votes to overturn a state election so it goes in his favor. That act was the very definition of election fraud. Perhaps not the kind the person you replied to was inferring, but it's real and we have all witnessed it.
The courts don't want to get involved with politics, hence the lack of evidentary hearings & dismissals based on technicalities such as standing, mootness, latches, jurisdiction, lack of injury, etc. A judge has a number of tools to avoid hearing a case.
This crowdsource site has a collection of the evidence.
To flip the standard around, the chain of custody has been broken for millions of the votes. This means these votes cannot be verified as being authentic or legal. Also the IT infrastructure is not secure, despite Christopher Krebs' claim. How do I know? Georgia's Election Machines was remotely exploited by Jovan Pulitzer's team. Pulitzer also has diagnostic technology which can forensically verify if a paper ballot is inauthentic.
America simply needs to do better. Third world countries have higher standards with their elections. This election (& others) is an embarrassment to the United States.
~~edit~~
To fix these reoccurring issues/embarrassments, we need the following:
* All laws need to be followed
* A full certified chain of custody for all eligible & legal ballots
* Audit ALL Elections
* Open Source ALL relevant Election Software & Hardware
* Public Domain & distributed Voter Rolls
* Public Domain & distributed Precinct data
* All Tabulation traffic is logged
* All Electronic Ballot images is saved
* All ballots are forensically audited using automated processes. The forensic technology should be Open Source.
* Equal representation of both parties with the poll workers, poll watchers
* Protect poll watchers from harassment & removal
* Ensure public health safety measures do not affect Election Integrity
60 court cases(and counting!) about it have been lost or simply thrown out because of lack of evidence. But sure, let's pretend that there's any kind of uncertainty about it.
Numerous cases had their merits scrutinized and soundly rejected, such as the one against Wisconsin Election Commission.
Moreover you aren't entitled to have your "evidence" heard when you're invoking non-existent legal rights (such as one state overturning the results of another state, or asking a state legislature to decide instead of letting the votes stand), and no one should take the word of random person in a comment thread over the collective consensus of 60+ cases rejecting every legal theory Trump's team put forward.
There's a basic pattern with all of this. Someone insists Trump had a legitimate grievance, it leads down an obscure rabbit hole of tangled facts and interpretations that, when investigated, turns out to be a series of confusions, basic misundertandings, insane theories of law fundamentally incompatible with Democracy, and in some cases willful misrepresentation of the facts.
Trump's legal team was largely incompetent, and invoked non-existent legal rights and authorities to challenge valid election results, and were appropriately dismissed.
>>Thrown out due to Laches and lack of standing or lack of injury.
I don't know what "Laches" is? Besides,
>> Evidence was never actually heard in any courtroom
Well, that is a lie, many of his cases were thrown out due to lack of evidence and lack of witnesses willing to actually testify to anything. Guess where does that happen? In a courtroom. Where a judge looks at the case and decides whether to proceed with it or not. So all of these cases had their time in court, to say otherwise is just a lie. You, like many other people, seem to operate under the assumption that you first start a case, everyone gathers and then you present evidence. That's not true, at least not in the US it isn't. Evidence has to be presented when you file to open the case, and since there wasn't any, judges have dismissed the cases. Why would they continue? So they could gather in an empty room listening to...nothing? Evidence can be admitted to the case later, with the permission of a judge, but you can't just start a case with nothing in the first place, which is what Trump and his team were doing.
Well, thanks but I won't, I think people trying to steal an election should be in jail, so my wish for 2021 is that we see trump and his cronies where they need to be - in prison. Either because of the election, or because of his many other crimes, I'm really not going to be fussy about it, he's done enought to spend rest of his life behind bars, attorneys everywhere will have enough to bring him to justice.
>>Trump was just Hindenburg
Hindenburg represented the complete collapse and end of the entire airship industry, it has crashed and burnt and with it the entire trust and reputation these ships had. And it crashed and burnt because people in charge of building them wilfully ignored the dangers of building flying ships filled with explosive gas.
So yeah, I think this is a very apt comparison to trump - just probably not in the way you intend.
Edit: so this is fun, https://twitter.com/Elaijuh/status/1347205394393927697 Trump campaign lawyer throws him under the bus "“client has used the lawyer’s services to perpetrate a crime and the client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant”"
You should really consider the facts instead of baseless claims repeated ad-nauseum.
Meanwhile, keep in mind that Trump himself, whenever asked to present any proof that substantiate any of his wild outlandish claims, falls back to the convenient excuse that his proof needs to be kept secret and away from the public to not be untarnished.
Trump does this continuously, even in his infamous Georgia tphone call with fellow Republicans when they stated quite bluntly that they had absolutely zero evidence to review election claims and directly requested Trump to help them out and hand out any evidence as a last resort effort.
Now as yourself this: if Trump is days before Biden is sworn in, without any election fraud claim being shown to be valid or realistic, and when fellow Republicans beg him for some evidence to support his claims for them to be able to mount any semblance of a case... Why on earth would he still refuse to share any info at all?
* credible claims of foreign interference in elections
* credible claims of organized state agent hacking of US digital infrastructure.
* voting machines with designs and source code which are secret, and no way to know if they're working as advertised.
We have cryptographic protocols for honest, verifiable, anonymous elections, which we don't bother implementing. It's all an honor system, in a government without much honor. We, quite frankly, have no way to know if votes are being counted correctly or honestly.
As much as I disbelief Trump's claims of this election being rigged by democrats, the claims that we have excellent election security are false too. We have a huge chunk of the country openly lying about election results, and another half lying about election security. Two lies don't make a truth.
If our current elections aren't being manipulated, you can bet future ones will be. It's easy for an organized state agent to do, and if it wasn't being done before, it will be now. And fixing this will be almost impossible post-Trump, because Democrats.
When Georgia conducted a hand re-count of the ballots without using dominion machines and found it fairly consistent with the original tally (biden did drop 2000 votes but not because of count erros), doesn't that put to pasture claims about hacked voting machines flipping votes?
I think that poster isn't disagreeing but merely saying that that doesn't necessarily mean such a system couldn't be compromised in a future election. (Unless every single polling station with machines does a recount by hand for all elections from now on. But then it might put into question why we have the machines at all.)
This is similar to the common argument about voter fraud. Of course there was almost certainly basically no fraud to speak of in this election, like usual. (And that's important to emphasize, especially right now.) But the way this overall topic tends to be approached in general is very odd, to me:
There's a routinely used argument that concern about voter fraud is ridiculous because there's essentially been no significant incidence of it in modern history. This isn't unreasonable to bring up, but I think by itself is a very poor approach to risk assessment that's reminiscent of early COVID predictions/warnings/guidance and 2016 election odds from many of the same people. Especially when some foreign intelligence agencies appear to be getting increasingly brazen, and when considering that for most of the recorded history, voting was a lot less digitized.
There was almost no incidence of jets being deliberately flown into buildings as a form of WMD, until some people pulled out all their cards and exploited a "0-day", doing as much damage as they could in a single effort before a "patch" could be deployed. And sometimes it's simply a matter of no one making a serious, motivated attempt to do something until one day someone finally does.
The problem is that the countermeasures people want to put in place strip people of their ability to vote legitimately. For example, voter id laws are put into place to prevent voter fraud, that you admit isn't happening, but strip ten of thousands of people of the right to vote. [0] Similar to poll taxes and literacy requirements in the 19th century, this was said to have a better electorate, but it was selectively enforced so that it disproportionately affected black voters. That's why you have to be careful with this rhetoric. When someone is fixing a problem that doesn't actually exist, they could (likely?) have ulterior motives.
I'm aware of this issue and agree with the concern, but there are additional ways of mitigating fraud, and I wasn't thinking about IDs or any specific solutions while writing the post. (But now that it's come up, in theory if this were to be implemented, I think there could possibly be ways of proactively providing as many people as possible with IDs without requiring them to spend money or time to obtain it; maybe this could be done over a years-long process before adding any requirements. I don't know all the nuances, though.)
I was just trying to talk about this specific argument and how it's often used in isolation to create a certain way of seeing things that I think is based on shaky grounds.
I'm not trying to take any ideological stance, but just discuss epistemology in general. (Though for the record, I've only ever voted and will very likely only ever vote Democrat. I promise I don't have any ulterior motives regarding this topic and am a strong supporter of voter enfranchisement. Risk assessment in general just is a component of my job and hobbies.)
I'm not accusing you of anything. I just want to make sure that it's clear why proactively preventing vote fraud when there historically has been much isn't as simple as it sounds. My parents are all about voter IDs and other measures because they have only heard one side of the argument, that it is possible. What they haven't heard about is the cost to these laws.
Epistemologically, that's why I believe these discussions should be evidence based instead of theoretical or ideological. We don't do a good job of figuring out what is going to work and what is not going to work until we've tried some stuff out. And it needs to balanced. There will be a few people who will try to cheat the system. As long as they get caught and it doesn't affect the election, that's ok. There will be a price to pay in legitimate votes who are unable to cast a ballot because of whatever countermeasures we put in place. The question is, did we strike the right balance?
I don’t think this is as hard of a problem as people make it out to be. Why not just take fingerprints, plain old ink on paper, in lieu of ID? Or a photograph of your face that is immediately printed and signed, they already do this at airports. You should have to leave some form of identification but there are lots of free, easy and instant ways to do this that don’t exclude anyone.
Analogy: When I looked around my computer, I found no evidence of someone having broken in. Doesn't that lay to pasture claims of all these "security holes" "zero-days" and "hackers?" And aren't these "security updates" just paranoia?
Whether or not something happened in Georgia this election -- and I don't particularly care whether something did -- the perfectly valid point is we have an insecure election system, and we should fix it.
Why is that evidence in any direction. “Computer security is hard” is just as much evidence that Biden actually won by 10% in Georgia as it is that Trump won.
It's not evidence in any direction. It's perfectly possible votes were stolen from Biden, from Trump, or neither. We don't know. I wish we did.
In this context, though, security is NOT hard. We've just made the decision not to do it. I see no excuse for why I shouldn't be able to see the source code and design of the voting machines in my state, or audit any part of the manufacturing or voting process. This should all be open and transparent. A not-for-profit should be able to spot audit a hundred random machines around the US:
- Swipe a credit card to cover supervisor time
- In a secure facility, confirm the source code and hardware are as advertised on local voting machines
This just isn't rocket science.
Judging from downvotes and comments on HN, building political consensus around that will be neigh-impossible post-Trump. Click on my post history. Most of my comments are in the +3 to +15 range. Virtually all my comments in this thread are either 1 (not voted on) or between 0 and -4 (having gone to -6). None are swinging Trump conspiracy theories; merely pointing out the obvious: we need robust, auditable, secure voting.
The context here is that one side is advancing frivolous claims of voter fraud, believed by millions of people, some of whom were moved by those claims to violent insurrection.
And in this context, you are choosing to jump into those conversations to express vague generalities and open ended speculation that can't be pinned down to any specific claims about anything in a context where a mob is looking to those exact themes to motivate their violence.
There's a form of dishonesty that comes from making untrue claims about voter fraud, and there's another kind that comes from the themes you choose to emphasize to fan on the flames of false arguments while being coy about whether you personally believe them. This falls in the latter category, and this is the problem people have with your comments.
Well, there's a question about what will calm millions of people down:
1) Lying to them that elections are secure, and telling them to sit down and shut up
2) Taking concerns seriously and addressing them
Your premise is that #1 will prevent a violence. My claim is that #2 will.
You can flipped this around. We had a lot of violence and lawless behavior around BLM protests. What would have calmed people down? Telling them we didn't have racism, to go home, and shut up? Or providing a clear process to address their concerns peacefully?
I think most folks on the right will move on from the Trump election if the left knocks it off with "sit down and shut up," which is coincidentally the exact language right wing commentators use.
As a footnote, which concerns are valid is almost irrelevant. For this, what matters is which concerns people believe.
The specific allegations about voter fraud as believed by millions are indisputably fraudulent.
You are trying to equivocate between those specifically and indisputably false allegations and something completely different: a much more generalized and vaguely expressed set of concerns with election security writ large.
These have nothing to do with each other and yet you are equivocating between them.
That's exactly what the other side says about BLM.
With that attitude -- that there are tens of millions of people who can't be trusted or reasoned with and need to be locked up and silenced -- civil war is inevitable.
"Those people" are human beings too. You might not agree with them and they might be wrong, but they're not very different from you. They're just exposed to different culture and information.
Don’t be so tribal. You’re othering a broad swath of people, most of whom are quite reasonable. Hyperbole and lack of communication and empathy are what got us into this mess in the first place. This shit comes from both sides and it has to stop.
It is. How many papers were been published in Oakland between 2000 and 2010 on election security? Lots. Clearly this is a problem interesting enough to capture the interest of computer security faculty. It isn't a toy problem.
In addition to technical challenges (open sourcing isn't magic), there is a very complex organizational challenge due to the decentralized structure of elections in the US.
But more importantly, making vague claims about hypothetical limitations of the existing systems while tens of millions of americans believe that actual literal fraud stole the election from Trump and are using that as motivation to invade the capitol building and disrupt the process of transitioning power between parties is tone-deaf to say the least.
Proper security may be hard, but election security is at the level of someone running a 5-year-old Android phone which no longer receives security updates.
Seriously.
It's tone deaf to one side, but I'm pretty scared since the other side has, just as wrongheadedly, convinced itself these systems work. I'm not worried about 50,000 votes stolen due to doublevoting somewhere or a mailtruck of votes getting lost. If victory falls on the 50.1% mark versus the 49.9% mark, that's okay. I'm worried because we have a system which IS exploitable and which WILL be exploited, if it hasn't already been.
Rigging US elections has incredible ROI for any foreign state actor, and simply isn't hard.
For the record, I made equally tone deaf comments when 9/11 happened and when COVID19 was in its early days. Now, they're common sense to most people. I don't want to wait for Russia, China, or North Korea to pick our next president before we do something.
Open source, transparency, and auditability won't solve the problem 100%, but they'll prevent most types of gross, blatant rigging. Cryptographic voting algorithms or paper trails will get us much of the rest of the way there. We don't need perfect security, but we need to be in a place where a single point of compromise can't break our democracy.
> Proper security may be hard, but election security is at the level of someone running a 5-year-old Android phone which no longer receives security updates.
I'm serious. Go read the papers. You very obviously don't have a background in academic security. Because Oakland doesn't tend to accept stuff on trivial matters.
For some reason I can't reply to your other comment about your downvotes, so I'll just reply here.
We have reached an era of wrongthink- where even if you align slightly with the wrong side in your thinking, you are silenced. You are no longer allowed to agree with any portion of the wrong side, it must wholly be rejected.
I don't understand this "electronic voting machines are bad" myth. I voted with one of these machines for the first time this election and all it did was... print out my choices on a ballot. It takes all of 15 seconds to look over your votes and make sure they're correct. Then I manually put the ballot in a privacy sleeve, walked over to the ballot box, and inserted my ballot. The machine was a mere convenience that kept me from needing to manually circle my choices with a pen. Not much opportunity for widespread voter fraud in my opinion.
If the machines were switching votes so rampantly you'd think, of the millions of people who voted, more people would've raised concern at the polls when they noticed their vote for the president of the United States at the top of the printed ballot was switched.
I'm inclined to agree that no paper trail is a bad idea. It's interesting that of all the states you listed, only NJ went blue this election. You'd think democrats would be the ones more vocal about potential fraud from electronic voting.
The ballots are counted by machine too right? I would not say that is a good idea but the hand recounts would have shown any fraud from those if there were any fraud.
I'm not worried about machines which print ballots and leave a paper trail. That's not what they look like many places. You hit a button on the screen. Your pray your vote is counted correctly. There's no audit trail, no security, and no transparency.
Techniques like Zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and multiparty computation exists, but none of them are sufficient for elections. The security requirements are simply too complex, and we can't require that every voter manages a private keypair to issue their votes from an electronic device they can't audit.
* You have a list of people who voted. That's public.
* You have a list of votes. That's public (and not correlated with the above) by anonymous tokens.
* You have an anonymous token, which lets you verify your own vote.
If the list of people who voted doesn't match up to real people, that's detectable. If I go into Massachusetts and find 10% of the people claimed to have voted don't exist, I can confirm fraud. If someone who didn't voted has there vote counted, that also confirms fraud.
Anyone can count up and add up the votes. That's public too.
And anyone can confirm their own vote was counted.
How are those tokens less complicated to use than a private keypair? How do you ensure that the votes are cast anonymously, without leaking metadata from timing, etc?
Yeah. They've been around for decades. Applied Cryptography gives them (excellent book; highly entertaining, yet reasonably mathematical). The gist of it is that:
- Everyone can verify who voted (so number of votes equals number of voters)
- Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted
- All votes are released under unique, anonymous identifiers, so anyone can recount all votes
- However, no one can verify anyone else's vote individually
It's pretty awesome! I've watched with gradual shock and horror as voting machines came out and seemed almost designed for riggable elections.
Right on. Voting systems must have integrity but also voter anonymity. To quote Schneier:
> If we could do away with anonymity — if everyone could check that their vote was counted correctly — then it would be easy to secure the vote. But that would lead to other problems. Before the US had the secret ballot, voter coercion and vote-buying were widespread.
Suprisingly enough, the strongest fear is not so much "pressuring people to vote for X" but "having a black market of people getting paid to vote for Y".
... and I can lie and show you the vote of someone who voted the same as your orders, unless you following me to the polls (in which case, you might as well hide a pinhole camera in my button).
I've seen this before. Do you remember the name of the algorithm?
The question I've had with this is whether you can prove who you voted for. If you can, you can sell your vote and prove tongue buyer that you voted correctly.
It's complex. The scheme I saw in Applied Cryptography would in abstract permit vote selling, but not simple vote selling -- you'd need pretty complex security between the buyer and seller.
If you're trying to buy my vote, and I'm trying to sell it, I could give you my unique anonymous number, and you could verify my votes. But I could also vote a different way, lie, and give you someone else's unique number, and you'd have no way to know.
You could ask for a special ballot too, where, for example, I vote a particular pattern (yes/no/no/yes/yes/no), to encode things, ideally picking ones that aren't likely to come up in practice, or other complex schemes, but these generally have work-arounds.
At the end of the day, though, it'd be cheaper and easier for you to require me to wear a pinhole camera to vote, do a mail-in, or otherwise. Plus, we had open voting for much of history, and it worked okay. If we went back to the risk of illegal vote selling versus the risk of wholesale election fraud, I'd take the former which seems like the lesser of two evils (and much easier to police too).
How would this work in practice? Voters post to a publicly accessible append-only database from a personally owned computer? Can this be implemented on paper ballots?
I'm not sure it's relevant. Paper ballots can't be hacked on a national scale. I trust my local election commission. And even modest fraud can be managed; if someone wins with 45% of the vote, we've changed an outcome, but the democratic check-and-balance remains.
The problem is closed, proprietary, secretive, touchscreen voting machines. For all we know, Biden won Texas. Or perhaps everyone wrote in Putin as a joke write-in. We just don't know.
For how this works in practice, Applied Cryptography has a nice, readable explanation.
Some of these "stolen" elections took place under Republican state administrations, supervised by Republican appointed election officials. WTF are these people doing if tens of thousands of votes are sneaking through the system and they can't find any evidence of it, and say themselves the election was fair?
Trump did exactly the same thing in 2016, claiming massive vote fraud and that the election was being stolen from him. Not only did he provide no evidence, but his own Justice department and subsequent administration was unable to find any evidence. If he really though the electoral system was so badly flawed, he had control of the House and Senate to do something about it, so why no voting reforms? If he actually believed his claims why didn't do something about it?
The truth is he didn't do anything because there's nothing to be done. He and his people know perfectly well the electoral system is fair, that's why they haven't bothered to reform it. There would be no point. In fact it would simply make them responsible for the voting system and thus unable to claim fraud anymore. Instead he's simply using claims of fraud as a tool to incite his supporters and avoid the ignominy of being a "loser". Something he has said many times he cannot tolerate.
Both his words and his actions show very clearly this is a pre-meditated attempt to undermine democracy in America.
Can you please point to where I contradict any of that?
It's like telling your grandma to install security updates, and her coming back saying no one has broken into her computer so it must be secure (while gramps insists someone has).
The simple fact of the matter is our elections are NOT secure, and making them secure would be cheap, and easy.
We have absolutely no idea whether the vote counts in the US are authentic. That doesn't mean anyone stole this election. That certainly doesn't mean Democrats stole this election. But it does mean we should secure them.
Of course, physical security is a cheap and easy step. The harder part is gaming our media. If attackers can help direct where voters vote with $$$, that's a cheap attack too.
As a footnote, if I were an attacker, of any type, I wouldn't even bother with the November election. The easiest place to attack is primaries. Both 2020 and 2016, we had among the weakest candidates among the crop win.
We're going from a con artist to a senile mildly corrupt lifetime politician of limited accomplishment. UPGRADE! I'll expect we'll move from major corruption to minor corruption, without an attempted coup.
What I think we deserve, though, is a politician with intelligence, vision, and integrity.
That requires fixing systems, rather than GOP pointing to DNC, and vice-versa.
> We have absolutely no idea whether the vote counts in the US are authentic.
Of course we do. Georgia did a full hand recount this election, finding no evidence of anything like what you're alleging. And many states do random-sample hand recounts every election. We didn't check every single vote, but "absolutely no idea" is way off the mark.
> finding no evidence of anything like what you're alleging
Indeed. A recount provides absolutely no evidence in either direction on what I'm alleging. Fortunately, if you'd like evidence, you can look for the auditable source code for my local voting machines on github. Didn't find any? There's your evidence of a transparency issue.
What many of these posts did provide evidence for are reading comprehension issues on web forums. But we knew that already.
>A recount provides absolutely no evidence in either direction on what I'm alleging.
Georgia electronic votes were all backed by voter verifiable auditable paper ballots. That's independent of whether the software is competent at arithmetic. A hand recount does, in fact, protect against fake totals.
Unfortunately, there are a handful of states that don't mandate paper backups. The solution for machines of that sort isn't open source—it's adding auditable paper.
It's really a waste of time. These people don't care if the election was fair, don't care that Republican appointed officials responsible for implementing the voting systems in Republican run states verified everything. They don't care how audit-able the votes were. They don't even care that Trump and the Republican leadership have no interest in vote reform despite repudiating the results of the vote.
I kind of do care that the election is fair, and I've kind of cared for decades that we've undermined that. I care about that a lot more than Georgie. Discounting me as "these people" is distinctly how we get to corruption.
"These people" also couldn't allege fraud in Georgia if we had fraud-proof systems. It's not rocket science. I wish we could point them to proof. We can't. We can point "these people" to pretty good evidence, but we wouldn't have this particular problem if we could point to hard proof.
We'd probably have a different problem, but it is what it is.
> "These people" also couldn't allege fraud in Georgia if we had fraud-proof systems. It's not rocket science.
What evidence do you have that they couldn't? Plenty of people would make claims of fraud, even in a "fraud-proof" election systems. What would that even look like, in theory, let alone in practice?
What specifically out our current system leaves it open to the widespread, multi-state fraud that is being claimed by the president and others?
... That we have touchscreen voting machines, without auditable source code, auditable hardware, or corporate transparency? That we have no real way to know they're at all running honest algorithms?
I mean, seriously. Look under the hood for five minutes.
How does any of that apply to the situation in Georgia? Sure, the things you mention would be nice incremental improvements to Georgia's system and states that do not have an auditable paper ballot trail are very problematic, we don't disagree there.
You imply that liberals have changed their position on this post-Trump, but I don't think you'll find these suggested improvements controversial to most liberals. But what do you mean by we can't point the people of Georgia to hard proof? I fail to see how addressing even all of the points you raise would suddenly convince the president and his supporters. The existing measures don't appear to have swayed them at all. So I don't think it's productive to pretend like this wouldn't be a problem if only we had some mythical "fraud-proof" system.
> Today, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the results of the Risk Limiting Audit of Georgia’s presidential contest, which upheld and reaffirmed the original outcome produced by the machine tally of votes cast. Due to the tight margin of the race and the principles of risk-limiting audits, this audit was a full manual tally of all votes cast. The audit confirmed that the original machine count accurately portrayed the winner of the election.
> By law, Georgia was required to conduct a Risk Limiting Audit of a statewide race following the November elections.
> The differential of the audit results from the original machine counted results is well within the expected margin of human error that occurs when hand-counting ballots. A 2012 study by Rice University and Clemson University found that “hand counting of votes in postelection audit or recount procedures can result in error rates of up to 2 percent.” In Georgia’s recount, the highest error rate in any county recount was .73%. Most counties found no change in their finally tally. The majority of the remaining counties had changes of fewer than ten ballots.
Simply alleging something doesn't make it true, or likely or even plausible. It's just saying stuff, especially when you have no evidence and hence no reason for the stuff being said.
Well, I'd argue in all the places voter fraud is likely, we can't have evidence since we don't have transparency or records. That's not the same places as the Trump crowd is talking about right now, but touch screen voting with unauditable proprietary software? Come on. There's one private company which controls the election outcomes in several states. We have no way to know whether they're doing anything illicit and no way to know.
So I say again, why aren’t Trump and Republican law makers and state leaders doing anything about it? Why have they sat on their hands on this issue for four years, including a period when the Republicans controlled both houses and the Presidency? I think we all know the reason why.
>We have absolutely no idea whether the vote counts in the US are authentic.
We never have. The only way to know would be to personally verify the voter's driver's license, watch them vote and submit their ballot, count their ballot, and repeat for every single voter in the United States. Since this will never, ever happen, one could always make vague claims about authenticity. But without concrete evidence of fraud, it doesn't matter.
> The harder part is gaming our media. If attackers can help direct where voters vote with $$$, that's a cheap attack too.
Let’s be real that’s basically a part of politics. That’s not an issue with elections per se.
Plus it’s clearly easier to just use social media and targeted propaganda to manipulate voters.
I’m all for secure elections and improving that security.
But my understanding is that to date when people have taken a serious look they’ve found no meaningful evidence of fraud.
The real deal is if we got rid of the electoral college then the presidency wouldn’t come down to a few thousand votes in a few counties in a few states.
> The real deal is if we got rid of the electoral college
I reckon the US system needs to self-reform if it wants to survive. All democracies change their electoral laws from time to time. The current system appears unsustainable: roughly two thirds of the electorate now feel fundamentally disenfranchised (one third thinks it's racist; the other that it's corrupt).
... and it's both racist and corrupt. I agree we need reform if we're to survive. Between BLM this spring, DC now, the fringe militant elements, we're seeing more and more violence.
I will mention that the split-down-the-middle thing isn't a property of electoral college. That's how you win in a democracy. If voters are distributed between 1 and 10 on some issue:
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
I win by picking 5.5. Whatever you pick, you get a minority of voters. That's complicated by primaries. In the same system, if I want to be a ballot candidate, though, I can't do that. I want to pick 2.75 or 7.25 so the majority of my party votes for me.
Of course, things like charisma fit in a bit too, but for the most part, if one party runs a 2.74 candidate and the other a 7.24, the 7.24 has an advantage, and vice-versa for 2.76 and 7.76.
All that things like electoral college do is shift weights. Tight elections just means politicians have learned to play the game well.
A system where someone with 40% or 60% of the vote wins isn't fundamentally broken -- the underlying check-and-balance works. What is fundamentally broken are when incentive structures misalign.
If he is senile (and a fair amount, but not all, of the "evidence" for that is propaganda), then it probably means that his cabinet will mostly run the show or that he'll be removed from office. This same line of thinking gave me some peace of mind on Trump, and it really held for about a year and a half that it took him to fill the cabinet with more pliant people.
It's also worth pointing out that Biden has a stammer. He hides it extremely well and has had extensive therapy throughout his life, but it still comes out occasionally and is the root of most of these concerns.
Of course there is a cabinet around him, and if his condition is really serious he will step down.
What strikes me, and what I want to say, is why pick someone like HIM out of all people available, and why does everyone seem to ignore his condition? Seeing him talking, it seems like himself and everyone around him try really hard not to put something cognitively challenging in his head, that will have to translate to comprehensible speech.
Do those in charge think one's name and past deeds campaign on their own, as opposed to the actual candidate showcasing himself with his present words and image? Does the need to bring Donald down give a blank canvas to the other side to put in front someone unfit?
I am semi-sure the President can be a puppet - not by definition, but can happen sometimes I guess - since Bush Jr, that creature with the obviously sub-par IQ and cognition, was elected - and again, nobody in the US seemed to actually freak out 24/7 with having such a man as the president. Just remember on the reason he cited for deciding to attack Iraq - and I am not talking about the false WMD claims, but for "God told me", which he stated in complete seriousness. So, when I saw that guy governing, I said to myself - it can't be this thing having the actual power here, he does not have the mental capacity to achieve that on his own.
Same with Biden. He obviously does not have the mental capacity to rule, and Donald going away is not enough reason to be ok with that. I don't even see a consensus of the type "Yeah he is an old senile guy, we'll just use him to take down Trump and then we see how it goes" - everyone pretends he is normal, and that's what baffles me.
The whole fabricated evidence thing has been pretty funny. With both Biden and Clinton, the number of fabrications meant that the few times real things came up, they were simply ignored by the main stream media.
The main stream media has engaged in slightly less fabrication, but there was definitely some of the same "boy who cried wolf" dynamic in the other direction too.
> And fixing this will be almost impossible post-Trump, because Democrats.
Why exactly should Democrats block any attempts at improving election security?
The Democrats even introduced several election security bills the last couple years that all got blocked by the GOP..
My experience is that the stance the Democrats take is the opposite of the stance the Republicans take, and vice-versa. If one party flips on an issue, the other almost immediately flops.
At this point, the Republicans are mid-flop towards election security, while the Democrats have made statements which will be very hard to back out of, so I think we're seeing the fish flipping.... You can even see this in action, as every single one of these posts is trending toward negative infinite upvotes, where just a few months ago, they would have been trending towards upvotes. Even a mild pointer to a textbook on cryptography summarizing a cryptographic protocol is now at zero.
I'll be delighted to be proven wrong, though. Democrats will control both chambers and the presidency. If I see crypto-secure voting, I'll be delighted. I just don't see it. At this point, Democrats are firmly in the voting-is-secure-nothing-to-see-here camp. I understand why given the unpleasantness in DC, but it is, as a point of fact, not secure. That doesn't mean it's been rigged, but it does mean we should fix it.
> My experience is that the stance the Democrats take is the opposite of the stance the Republicans take, and vice-versa. If one party flips on an issue, the other almost immediately flops.
I’m sorry but that is way too reductive. For one thing, there’s a bipartisan consensus (for better or worse) on a lot of foreign policy, which is a pretty huge area.
And, your comment obscures the meaningful differences in ideology between the groups of people each party represents. And the different interests of those groups.
The Democrats are far from perfect. But it’s not a “both sides equally bad” situation.
Well, maybe it is when it comes to corporate money in politics. But even there you see bipartisan consensus on the fringes, I think, plus iirc the Republicans were basically all about Citizens United.
But yeah money in politics is a big problem on both sides. To be fair, it’s been a big problem in all of politics throughout all recorded history.
Which doesn’t mean we can’t (and haven’t) made some progress.
I'm not actually sure it is too reductive. Game theory predicts almost exactly the behavior we see.
My own observation is that we saw major progress with the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment, the Constitution, and so on. Progress slowed around a hundred years ago. From around 1920-1970, we had progress on issues of representation, race, and gender, but otherwise, political behavior gradually drifted towards the Nash equilibrium.
1970-2020, progress mostly stopped, and we've pushed hard to optimizing to game theory. Politicians who now get elected play a near-optimal game, and playing this game is overt.
To make progress, we'd need significant reform of the system.
I would argue, though, that a statement like "money in politics is a big problem on both sides. To be fair, it’s been a big problem in all of politics throughout all recorded history" is very reductionist.
For most of history, it wasn't so much money as military might. If I had money and you had military, soon you'd have both. Money was a component of buying military, but it was just one component (see Rome v Carthage for an example, or Athens v Sparta).
I'd much rather be controlled by someone corrupted by money than by a corrupt warlord where I'm a serf. Democracy is a big step up. We just need another step up right now... and pretending we don't is actively harmful.
> From around 1920-1970, we had progress on issues of representation, race, and gender, but otherwise, political behavior gradually drifted towards the Nash equilibrium.
1970-2020, progress mostly stopped,
Um if nothing else a LOT in the US happened with regards to women’s rights and feminism between 1970 and today. And LGBTQ rights.
Oh yeah - Obama! First black President. Kind of a big deal when it comes to race and social justice.
Also it’s just a hugely broad statement you are making. I’m not gonna speculate about the sweep of hisiory.
Also your point doesn’t really address the specific points I mentioned - real, actual differences between the parties.
[EDIT: For example if the Republican Party suddenly endorsed the Green New Deal (or other climate legislation) I don’t see the Democrats who already support such legislation flip-flopping.
Same with gun control laws.
And with more federal pandemic relief funds to individuals and states and cities.
They flopped like this on surveillance about two decades ago. Democrats were pro-surveillance, and Republicans were pro-privacy. Now, it's the other way around. I could list of a dozen examples when one party flips, the other flops.
And it's exactly what game theory predicts.
To go with even your first example, Nixon created the EPA.
Flops happen when both parties go too far left or too far right. At that point, it makes sense for the "crowded" party to leapfrog and grab the coveted center.
I don't think I ever said "oh both parties are the same and don't really stand for anything."
I think what I said was that both parties try to be just at the 50 percentile mark of voters, since that wins elections, while candidates try to be at the 75th/25th percentile since that wins primaries (and then sprint to the center).
If both parties are at e.g. the 36th and 37th percentile, the 36th percentile party can jump to the 38th and be wildly successful. That's what happened with surveillance. After 9/11, the electorate shifted, and Republicans leapfrogged the Democrats, leading to a lot of success.
Both parties fundamentally want to win first.
Whether that's good or bad depends on what you compare it to. You can view it as lack of spine, or as a democratic check-and-balance.
I agree that politicians and political parties want to win.
And I appreciate your clarification that (if I’m understanding correctly) you do believe there are currently some meaningful differences between the two parties.
The percentages bit I didn’t really follow (where’s the data/evidence? Or is this a theory?), and, if I’m being honest, on a day like today with the attempted coup and all, I simply don’t have the motivation to parse and understand more of what you are trying to say.
But I appreciate your clarification and additional effort to explain your intended point.
Theory seems to predict practice well, in this case.
Yes, there are meaningful differences. The differences behave just as game theory would predict, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. If you want 2nd amendment, vote Republican. If you want to control guns, vote Democrat.
You may be right that an individual politician might not flip on a stance because of those dynamics. Some optimize to dynamics and do flip and flop. Others happen to fit the current Nash equilibrium, and will generally eventually lose a primary or a general election once the equilibrium changes, and one with the aligned view will move in. It's a super-competitive system. The result is the same in the end.
But in terms of effort, given you're exhausted, perhaps I'll let you search for that when you have more mental capacity.
Good starting point is "Rules for Rulers," a short video on Youtube. But there's a lot of robust academic work behind it.
I think you have a misunderstanding on something here. Voting is mostly the province of the states, not the federal government. You will have to look at the actions of the individual state legislatures. Who is in control in DC isn’t going to have any effect on this.
> The Democrats even introduced several election security bills the last couple years that all got blocked by the GOP..
I totally could believe that.
But, be aware that just because you saw it in a left wing site (NYT, CNN, Vox etc), doesn't make it so.
Unfortunately, the few times something got me upset enough to actually try to track down original sources, I found the sites to be representing falsehood, on both sides of the spectrum.
Like, the complete and total opposite of the facts. Some twisted logic, omissions or half facts, but other times it seems they just said "facts be damned".
So, would be curious if you actually have sources, and if you actually looked up the bills and the riders, and the deals.
(1) My state doesn't use machines with a paper trail, so it's sort of irrelevant here.
(2) Many of the machines with paper trails don't show the voter what's printed is the same as their vote (although I haven't looked at the models you refer to).
If there's a printer paper trail that the voter can see, that's a big step forward.
The people he was talking to did not need more convincing about election being stolen, they needed to be told to go home. That is what Trump did. That video alone had more historical value than 99.99999 content on Twitter.
I expect there’s been some increasing call at Twitter to basically ban trump since 2016. I expect it’s mostly grown since the summer or so. I think of this move as being less about the specifics of the event than it is about that event making more people agree with the group that want to ban trump, allowing them to take a stronger action.
I feel like the “Twitter internal politics” explanation is more convincing than eg some small committee of expert moderators looking at trumps tweets and carefully deciding if they break the rules, balancing that with public interest considerations, and deciding if some restrictions should be placed on them
>The violating content they removed was trump repeating the same stolen election crud he's been saying for a month and then __urging the protesters to go home peacefully, preserve law and order, etc__.
There were two more tweets that led to the definitive suspension of the account, per the NYT. This is one tweet that was taken down almost immediately around 6:00PM.
“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he tweeted. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
I mean, 'Remember this day forever'? Like it's the Alamo? Really?
> (...) and then __urging the protesters to go home peacefully, preserve law and order, etc__.
Considering the way Trump, during his infamous Georgia phone call, fell back to weasel words to allow him to claim plausible deniability, such stating that "in my opinion they are shredding votes" after fellow Republicans made it very clear that there was absolutely no doubt that no vote was shredded... Those statements sound like nothing more than further weasel words to allow him to weasel himself out of any responsibility for his own actions.
This was also removed (which he sent shortly after the video):
"These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"
I agree with the premise. If your vote is stripped from you then force may be justified as you have no other option. The problem is that votes were not stripped and he knows it.
It's classic case of double talk. Everyone is free to interpret it as they will, he washes his hands of all this. If he really wanted to send people home, he could just have said: please go home. Or even: look, we've tried everything, we were wrong. I'm sure president Biden will take best care of this country. Please go home.
Even if he didn't think it, as what he thinks shouldn't matter unless he wants the stirrup to continue. He's supposed to be a politician, or even just a grown up person after all, not a child who cannot control himself.
Living in Hungary, living through this very same shit for 10, or maybe 14 years now, I've watched the whole Trump story in horror, but also thinking most of the time: yeah, this is kind of expected. This double talk thing is something our PM (Viktor Orban) does a lot of time. So yeah, Trump didn't want to calm these guys down, or to be more objective, that's not what he DID (even if we believe he's totally childish and dumb).
> "Even if he didn't think it, as what he thinks shouldn't matter..."
no, that's called lying, and we don't want presidents (or any person with even a modicum of power) doing that, even if we disagree (sometimes vehemently) with what he says. we have checks and balances on what the president can do, which is what matters. it would be great if trump were gracious, but he's not, and the people have (admittedly narrowly) spoken against him. our system has actually shown that it can tolerate a presidency like his intact.
I'm not really sure what you are arguing against. I just pondered the case what if he's intent wasn't to continue fuelling the unrest and concluded that even then he can still be blamed.
i'm arguing against advocating lying, which is what saying one thing while believing another is. it's preferring a truthful, if self-serving and vindictive, trump over a lying, self-serving and vindictive trump.
It also seems odd, that they were unable to protect the capitol. It was not a storm out of nowhere.
A bit orchestrated?
To show the less radical Trump supporters, this is what your president is responsible for, chaos and anarchy in the capitol. Disturbing the democratic process.
But I guess, don't assume evil, what can be explained with incompetence.
Well, Trump denied requests to send in the national guard multiple times according to reports. Pence later did when Trump didn't, and that's when things got under control.
This could've been prevented if the president (1) didn't incite this and (2) didn't deny national guard to step-in.
So what's left is the capitol police facing a mob invited by the president, without backup. And they stated they had two choices, barricade the capitol and prevent entry, or evacuate the people inside.
It could've gotten ugly if the people in the capitol got overrun, e.g. Pelosi facing people that think they're sent by Q to fight off a satanic coup by Pelosi, but they got evacuated to safety. Apparently capitol police chose to evacuate rather than to barricade, in hindsight that's clearly the least risky option to human health. If they break through with nobody inside, that's not as bad if they break through anyway with people inside. A bunch of idiots roaming the capitol building isn't a threat per se, shameful and sad yes, but not one that should've been met with violent force from a small number of capitol police at the expense of (and risk of not) evacuating the people inside.
>A bunch of idiots roaming the capitol building isn't a threat per se, shameful and sad yes, but not one that should've been met with violent force from a small number of capitol police at the expense of (and risk of not) evacuating the people inside.
Of course, if the mob were leftists or had any significant amount of minorities mixed in, there would have been rivers of blood outside the Capitol.
In Austin, 16-year-old Edwin Ayala attended a protest. He stood alone on a grassy hill, about a dozen yards away from police and other protestors. As Ayala stood still, an officer on the street raised his gun and shot a bean-bag bullet at the boy's head. Ayala collapsed instantly.
That list is just a list of incidents of police violence, not protest-related, many from before 2020, and some not even in the US.
I'm not disputing whether American police are violent; we have another example from yesterday: an unarmed woman killed by police.
I'm disputing the claim that the response would have been more aggressive at a leftist protest. Thousands of National Guard troops, in addition to police in riot gear, were dispersed to clear the Capitol. They did so. Less violence was required to do so, because the protestors complied.
> Thousands of National Guard troops, in addition to police in riot gear, were dispersed to clear the Capitol.
Were it a left wing protest, the National Guard would not have been delayed by the federal executive until after the insurrectionists had spent their energy and either failed to achieve their violent goals because the targets had escaped immediate threat, and would hace acted violently to disperse the crowd earlier, and the right-wing counter-protestors that would have been present (left-wing counter-protestors were specifically told to avoid this event by major left-leaning groups because of the risk of violence) would have been permitted by law enforcement to freely act violently against the same group targeted by LE. We know all that, because we've seen it time and again over the last year, across the US, including specifically in D.C.
19 dead in 2 weeks, without any aggression even close to what happened yesterday. It's obvious that the death toll would be higher if BLM protestors were as aggressive as the Trump protestors yesterday.
>Including the violence by civilians (whether we call them protestors or not), the leftist protests did lead to a lot more bloodshed. I misunderstood and thought you were talking solely about the police.
I was. Most of the victims during the protests were black. You cherry picked quotes from the article to support your views.
The reality is that a peaceful BLM protest was dispersed with greater violence so that the president can pose across the street with a bible, than a mob attacking and storming the Capitol.
Or a blm protestor attacking a citizen trying to protect their livelihood. But most people will probably turn a blind eye because it doesn't fit the narrative (blm riots = peaceful protests, capitol riots = domestic terrorism)
Makes me chuckle that the result of this + the deplatforming of most of the opposition will only result in even more extremism and separation in the US.
The level of violence at blm protests were a lot higher for a lot longer in a lot more places. The age groups were opposite. The weapons usage by protestors were much higher and the trepassing on private property didn't exist here. Besides by nightfall the protest was done blm protests turned violent at night.
No, now the Republican party is up there with the Communist party or Anarchists, as a danger to America and democracy. Republican mobs paraded racist Confederate flags through federal buildings in a violent attempt to overthrow an election.
Thank god for brave Americans who stood up to harrassment and threw out baseless, evidence-free lawsuits trying to overthrow state electors. Hell, even the head of the Republican party has been recorded trying to strong-arm state election officials and fake the reporting of votes.
Give it up. The Republican party is clearly more corrupt and anti-American than any other organization you can name.
Oh, I thought we were talking of Republicans invading a Federal building. If I'm off-topic I apologize.
And I probably vectored off too much on that one. Letting off steam. Sorry!
How does your comment relate to whether "if the mob were leftists or had any significant amount of minorities mixed in, there would have been rivers of blood outside the Capitol."?
> And they stated they had two choices, barricade the capitol and prevent entry, or evacuate the people inside.
This seems really strange to me. So the capitol police isn't staffed and doesn’t plan for a situation where they need to do both of these things?
What struck me the most is that the rioters seem like just a few hundred/thousand. Definitely scary but should have been able to be controlled by law enforcement. It wasn’t a million people or a zombie horde.
Their web site [0] says they have 2,300 officers and staff. So even if only half are officers it seems like 1,150 armed, trained capitol police should be able to control a mob of this size.
Certainly rioters trying to stage a coup is a rare event but seems like something that the capitol police should have contingency plans for.
Them saying that they had to choose between evacuating lawmakers and protecting the building seems like they need a lot of help planning.
Crowd control is very, very tricky. What would these armed police officers do, in your opinion? Shoot everyone? Arguably not. So what other options do they have? Without riot gear, that very difficult, and even with riot gear, the insurgents were partially armed. So yeah, evacuate and wait for superior numbers to show up was the smarter decision once things already did go south. Now follow it up with aggressive prosecution of those i taking selfies in senator offices would be a good thing, too.
Then there would be the question, of why there was no riot gear, when riots or riot-like situation could be expected. And since this was a planned event - and protestors openly planned to storm it - then maybe there should have been some better preparation?
And crowd control is indeed tricky, but it is still standard procedure for police.
You have fences.
You have lines of strong policemen with shields and tonfa.
You have tear gas.
Watercannon.
Beanbag.
Taser.
And ultimately, if rioters are indeed shooting or preparing to do so: there are guns with the police, too.
Many others brought the point: there probably would have been rivers of blood, if the black life matters movement, would have tried to storm the capitol.
I would expect them to have a plan for crowd control. How do other security organizations handle this? I would expect they do have an armory with riot gear and crowd control equipment.
That’s what I mean about odd that they don’t have a plan for this. I live near a top 50 city and the local police has crowd control equipment. Seems like the National capitol police would have some capability for this.
It seems this is the 17th time that the US uses the military against their own citizens. What is the death count up to now?
Can someone explain why the people trained in handling civilians, ie the police in the capital of the united states, is not enough in order to secure a building?
DC police have 3,800 officers [2] which is quite a few considering Washington DC has a population of 705,000 [3] (the national average is 470 people per officer, while DC has just 185 people per officer) and of course only so many of them can be on shift at a time.
A large protest can have 100,000-500,000 protesters [1]
So even if 95% of protesters are peaceful, a mere 5% inclined towards disorder can easily outnumber the local police. So it's not so crazy they'd need to call backup from somewhere. Why it's so common to deploy the national guard rather than cops from other nearby jurisdictions I don't know.
Washington, D.C. is very much a commuter and tourist town. Its population might be 705k, but the average number of people in the city on a given day is much higher. Tons of people who work in D.C. live in Virginia and Maryland and commute. I don't think I need to really get into why its kind of a major tourist destination. It does not surprise me they have a much higher people per officer than the average town.
True - what I'm trying to say is: Although DC cops can easily be outnumbered by protesters, in pure numbers DC isn't under-staffed by national standards.
Even the most self-sufficient of cities would find their cops outnumbered in such a situation.
It's not that they couldn't secure the capitol, it's because they didn't want to and are sympathetic to the rioters. The same way us devs look at requirements we know how to do but don't want to and instead say:
"Nope, can't do that, not enough timeslices on mutex semaphore of a monadic type for me to transpile that functionality of changing the color of the background"
Ok, that is very active from Trump, if the reports are true.
And if not, well he still is the military leader. That surely influences forces moral on how to act.
But was this not known?
The FBI could not bring more people in?
But yes, could also very well explained by, "they would not really dare it" preparation.
Trump had a lot of levers he could have pulled in order to ensure the security of the Capitol building. Should I take the fact he didn't pull them to mean that he sought to discredit his own movement?
> I did not know, securing the capitol is the job of the president? Aren't those seperate sectors?
DC is not a state, it’s a district under federal control. There is a mayor and a police department, but responsibilities that would normally fall to a state-level government are handled federally.
This is a contentious issue in the US right now, because it means that the residents do not have representation in the house and senate.
Primary policing duties are conducted by the Capitol Police, which are controlled by the Congress. However, they aren't really equipped for managing armed insurrections. So, in situations such as these they depend on the executive branch to provide support which may come from the FBI, national guard, or other agencies, which generally requires authorisation from the President.
I find the weasel word insurrection is being inserted quite a lot. It was suspiciously absent when other federal buildings were breached and vandalized earlier in the year. Calling it an armed insurrection is stretching it pretty far considering none of the videos show any armed conflict between the protesters and capital security... except for the unarmed woman who was shot in the neck and killed by security. It reeks of narrative building.
Find me an example of something happening on this scale at any point in 2019. We're talking about the Capitol building being taken over by a violent mob during a join session of Congress while the Vice President was presiding.
Further, the insurrectionists were definitely armed, at least five guns were seized from among those arrested.
> I did not know, securing the capitol is the job of the president? Aren't those seperate sectors?
In the case of Washington, DC they are not. The mayor has a normal municipal police force and the president has control over the equivalent of the state-level force, which would usually be called for such an incident. The Capitol specifically also has another force, independent from the municipal police, which is federally controlled.
There are numerous reports Trump explicitly refused to allow the National Guard to respond; governors of two adjacent states mobilized their state forces instead, and eventually Pence also mobilized the DC guard, which it's not really clear he had the authority to do (or if he does, also the authority to issue orders contravening Trump's refusal).
The NYT homepage currently describes what happened as "Mayhem Incited by Trump."
If you were to read that and go to Trump's twitter feed and read the above quoted tweet, you would now be left with two competing ideas: Was Trump inciting the mayhem or trying to quell it?
On the other hand, if you go to his Twitter feed and just see what's currently there, two blank spots replaced with, "This Tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules," you will think, "oh, Trump was inciting mayhem."
So deleting those tweets helps construct a narrative.
"I'm totally not wondering why no one will rid me of that meddlesome priest. That would be wrong! Please do not rid me of that meddlesome priest. Although, I have to say, he is quite meddlesome, and I completely understand why it's strange that nobody has rid me of his meddling. I love you!"
Can you think of any sitting president instigating a protest nevermind directing their ire at specific people (one of those tweets specifically targeted Mike Pence) and buildings (telling supporters to march down to the capital).
Anyone could see this was the most likely outcome of Trump's behaviour. I can't see how anyone could honestly argue otherwise.
Ah yes, because other than those two tweets Trump has never incited any mayhem before.
Certainly hasn't been shrieking that the election was stolen and that if Democrats control the government it's the end of democracy. Literal apocalyptic rhetoric that millions lap up.
Then of course at the rally yesterday telling people to march on the capitol building where they are currently stealing the election!
I'm not addressing the broader question of Trump's tweets, just the specific one of why Twitter might have chosen to censor those tweets in particular.
It's amazing that the reactions to this are both "should have banned him years ago for violating their rules" and "this is blatant dangerous censorship." Whichever side you're on, this is a lose-lose situation for twitter.
He is, but maybe there’s some survivorship bias there. We can’t really ask the shadowbanned people what they think of the moderation because they’re shadowbanned.
> We can’t really ask the shadowbanned people what they think of the moderation because they’re shadowbanned.
Just flip the showdead switch in settings and you can enjoy the infinite wisdom and feistiness of banned users. Can’t be easier. For instance, in this thread there’s exactly one banned sibling, making a gross, sexual personal attack.
Which always puzzles me. I have showdead on, just to get the whole picture. And because it is sometimes hilarious, to be honest. But how an you not realize you have been banned, when everyone on here is talking about it?
Far fewer people are shadowbanned these days. And I think if people are commenting reasonably without realising they are shadowbanned, dang will try to get in touch to let them know they are banned.
Most of the things they have to say are reasonable most of the time. Like mundane comments about programming languages and whatnot.
I think they would be pretty pissed off to know that they've been banned for months or more because they said something that rubbed the mods the wrong way at one point.
> I think they would be pretty pissed off to know that they've been banned for months or more because they said something that rubbed the mods the wrong way at one point.
We know, but some of us enjoy reminding Ian Murdock's friends-in-need of what they did.
Preferably before it's their turn to ask for help...
I don't want to blame @dang for this, but I see plenty of people talking about the toxic content of "The orange website", and several people have bothered to explicitly block links from here.
Could that just be a size thing? I remember Twitter being a lot more sane place before it was overrun by politics a few years ago. Or maybe the algorithm was better at keeping that stuff away?
I think large scale makes it impossible to be good. Small scale doesn't guarantee good.
Reddit, slashdot, and a whole slew of others went through an HN-like phase of high-quality discussions and content before turning into cesspools.
I think what makes HN unique is benevolent sponsorship. There isn't pressure to grow. It's recruiting for Y-Combinator, which eliminates most of the normal pressures.
My favorite article on the life cycle (growth & collapse) of online communities is “Attacked from Within”* from the old kuro5hin site. I’ve always been curious to how it’s suggested solutions to the moderation problem would turn out.
i also think it's a content thing. the content of HN doesn't lend itself to lunatics most of the time. i say "most" because it certainly happens (see the early covid threads and the hatred spewed for anyone questioning or even just wondering aloud about the lockdowns)
I don't think the incendiary rhetoric of most of Twitter (let alone Trump) would pass muster with HN moderation.
Edit: People downvoting me even though I'm right. Take most of the comments you see on Twitter in subject matter and/or delivery, and they would be either downvoted or moderated off this platform. No-one in good faith (who has had reasonable exposure to Twitter) could argue this is not the case. Just to be clear, I believe this to be a good thing.
I haven't heard of the false equivalence before, but it doesn't sound like this. There is that popular fallacy though, but I'm not aware if it has a name, where people think that the truth is always in the middle (the golden middle).
And you could say that this is it, but given the strong polarization and extremism around topics that involve politics it might be a good measure in this case. (Of course, depending on what exactly 'everybody' means.) By definition extremists of either side will see independent actors as hostile. But, of course, this is just a measure, not a proof.
The umpire is not going to advocate for either stand in this metaphor. The umpire will restrict or disseminate information for both sides. If the umpire does so in a way that irritates both parties, then they are doing so equally. Thus why PC said this.
so in the end you have to anchor this to some expertise and grounded-in-reality judgement.
For example, the majority in the aforementioned poll believed that COVID-19 was created in a lab in China. And to be honest, an average person really has no way of truly knowing this. They're not virologists or spies. They can only judge based on a gut feeling whether China is/isn't evil, and that is likely based on other things they've heard, which may include rumors, propaganda and Bond movies.
I dunno, I was friends in college with someone who moderated a subreddit whose head mod was univesally hated to the point where a rival subreddit formed and eventually outpaced the original.
I have to say from everything I heard about the guy, and my own rare interactions with him, the hatred of him was 100% justified. Some people are just very shitty and lack any sympathizers.
There is a problem when the umpire is an empire. If HN decided to ban Trump, no one but local hacker population would notice. In case of services with billions of registered users, quantity has its own quality.
Facebook, Twitter et al. built enormous platforms for speech and thus got caught up in the middle of all cultural and political conflicts on this planet. Not just American election(s), but elections in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Germany, UK, Brazil, plus religious conflicts such as Islamists vs. people who draw Muhammad.
They cannot possibly stay neutral in all those wars at once and when they start taking sides, they will be hated first and then, later, either dismembered or regulated to be a de-facto arm of the government.
> There is no popular position with moderation, everyone hates the umpire.
Afaik, one big issue is that this account was operating under different rules then everybody else. As in, twitter was more permissive with Trump then with other people.
And they will, once he's out, but they have made a formal statement effectively stating Trump's account gets preferential treatment for being such a powerful person.
Of course, the cynical reason is that Trump's tweets are responsible for a significant percentage of Twitter's "engagement" metrics; I'm sure that internally they have figures that indicate how much revenue they generate from Trump alone.
It’s not just the engagement. It’s the publicity and brand awareness too. Every time the news wants to report on what trump said, they talk about and link to twitter.
I sa an interview with Nicole Wallace today, the Nicole Wallace from MSNBC that used to be on W. Bush's WH team. Never thought I would agree someone from the W. admin, but she was right in saying, that she hersefl and the media at large were way to soft on trump, already before the election. I gues the same can be said about social media.
i do get the diffficult choice Twitter faced, Trump was / is the president. So everything he says is part of the official record. So I guess banning his personal account would ba quite difficult. Twitter, Facebook, YoutTube and so on could have added disclaimers already much earlier, so.
They were not content neutral. They by themselves said that they wont apply the same rules on Trump then on other political players on twitter. They did not wanted to ban or limit him, because he was president and thus special.
That is not being content neutral. Had it been content neutral, his account would be policed the same way as other peoples years ago.
No, it is a win-win for Twitter and FB and YT. They have made billions on the faux tribalism fight. Look at Parler: it is a ghost town because people want to argue and pwn the other side. Just talking to other people that agree with you is boring and not sticky. Twitter and FB and YT and FN and CNN and the rest have the sole goal of outrage to get more views and more ad revenue. This is the root of the problem.
I believe that the blame is hard to pin here. Instinctively I have blamed media for not reporting the truth, which led people to believing in so many mutually exclussive news. However, because the news media have to compete with social media they are bound to put out cheaper and more clickbaity content or go extinct.
I find it odd to say taking him off twitter is censorship. Twitter is used by 22% of adult Americans (according to Pew).
Trump and any president, on a whim can speak live to all Americans through all cable news channels. He could have called NBC, Fox, CBS, ABC etc to the Oval Office and in 5 minutes be live on basically every channel (including being streamed live on twitter). Instead he choose Twitter.
Apparently somewhere between 30 and 40% of adult Americans get news from TV, depending on whose surveys you look at. And cable news is only 16-19% of adults, having fallen enormously since 2016 and 2017 surveys. It was more than twice the proportion just a few years ago!
But yeah, he can always address the press and let the press disseminate his statements, which has its own pros and cons.
>It's amazing that the reactions to this are both "should have banned him years ago for violating their rules" and "this is blatant dangerous censorship." Whichever side you're on, this is a lose-lose situation for twitter.
A month from now Trump will not be on Twitter. Nobody will actually see what he allegedly says but he'll be gone.
my gut says the moment trump is not in office he starts a news channel or some sort of media company, I bet he even still have rallies. he'll leverage his supporters to influence elections and politics.
i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
>my gut says the moment trump is not in office he starts a news channel or some sort of media company, I bet he even still have rallies. he'll leverage his supporters to influence elections and politics.
You're right, no doubt. Though technically all the previous presidents do that. even Michelle Obama is on book tours and such. George W Bush does stuff with Michelle Obama as well.
>i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
True even before potus.
Here's the reality though. The political divide in the USA is at like 30+ year high. It used to be just democrats who divided. Republicans hadnt really changed much over the last several decades.
With platforms like twitter pushing republicans off their platform. It means the echo chamber will be becoming much worse. The political divide just begun for the republicans. The divide will become much larger than it is today because there's even less intermingling.
>Wait, is Twitter pushing republicans off their platform? I’m not a Twitter user, but this would surprise me.
The joe rogan podcast #1258 with Jack Dorsey and Tim Pool is a pretty good watch. Twitter has extensively banned right-wing personalities off their platform while outright allowing left-wing people break the rules.
For example Twitter recently blocked virtually all negative news about Joe biden and hunter biden during the election. For example in place of blocking the NYpost's coverage of hunter biden's corruption. They banned people to hide the story and then put a counter news article that called it fake news as trending.
Flipside, Twitter allowed Smollet's hate crime hoax. Twitter allows celebrities calling for the death of that maga hat kid. They allowed the russian collusion stuff that turned out to be completely false.
i think Trump will go beyond book tours, i think you're going to see "TrumpTV" and serious competition for other traditionally conservative leaning outlets like fox news etc.
Banning him years ago would be censorship but with clear rules equally applied to all.
Now we are unequal censorship.
Twitter is trending down and will probably not recover but they were going to take a nosedive after Trump left. This gives them political points with the left.
Doesn’t Section 230 actually protect them? Without it, they’d have no “safe harbor” protections against his account and would be forced to proactively remove stuff and would overmoderate to avoid lawsuits.
As OniBait says, I think (I've given up trying to figure out the details of what they're doing) they are using the threat of removing 230 as a stick to stop social media companies from any moderation at all. Withou 230, the user-generated-content business model is untenable.
I think it is more that they see selectively removing content as equivalent to moderation and thus they shouldn't have safe harbor. So maybe they want them to only remove illegal content or something?
Edit: nobody has an answer? It seems a very important question. Like if you say “spreading fake news”, you are saying Twitter should act as an authority of truth. Since they can’t possibly be that, where does that leave us?
You're not legitimately looking for an answer, therefore few are going to spend the time on it. Your questions are answered by honest research and taking the time to argue against yourself before doing it to other people.
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
You’ll notice that tweet was _not_ taken down, but tweets that told the protestors they were special people and something needed to be done about the stolen election were taken down.
It is a fact that that this election is over, and Biden won fair and square. 60 losses in State and Federal courts proves that. And yet Trump continues to incite his supporters by spreading falsehoods - the election was stolen, the other side committed fraud, patriots need to #stopthesteal and so on. Even yesterday he promised never to concede.
But sure, selectively look at the text where says “remain peaceful”. What a joke people like you are.
a supporter misspelled the word “cavalry” in tweeting that “The calvary is coming, Mr. President!”
Mr. Trump responded: “A great honor!”
------
But first came the remarks of the President, delivered on the Ellipse, just south of the White House.
“We will never give up,” he said. “We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s death involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”
Twitter is a company providing free service, and they have the right to prevent anyone from using it at their discretion without any explanation whatsoever. Twitter can explain their position but it can be completely wrong, and an explanation definitely does not make them any authority of any kind, and doesn't mean anything about other cases.
And at the outset, they changed the rules specifically to make his violations not violations (with an exception for leaders motivated by the constant complaints about his incessant violations); it was only toward the end that they restored the idea that there were rules that could apply to Trump (though they were still weaker than the generally applicable rules.)
I think that made sense to be honest; like it or not, Trump is the elected president, and denying the democratically elected president of your country access to your platform is quite the step. I mean, I sure don't like the entire situation as such, but in the same position, I probably would have done something similar.
It would draw some criticisms, but Twitter would be banning his personal account, the one he used before becoming president and will probably use afterwards, providing it isn't banned.
The official Twitter account of the POTUS is @POTUS, not @realdonaldtrump.
It's a bit of a fine line though; and wouldn't Trump just start tweeting at the @POTUS account? In fact, if I check it, it already looks just like @realdonaldtrump accounts since it's just retweets from there.
> This is the case in more or less any similar country.
reply
That’s true in the sense that Twitter’s rules change specifically motivated by Trump’s violation of their pre-existing rules applied globally, not just in the US, and enabled and was seized on by similarly-oriented leaders elsewhere, as well.
It's not just about Twitter; in my own country the courts gave our own Trumpian firebrand Geert Wilders more leeway on account of being a democratically elected MP in two separate rulings. Actually, many countries have presidential and/or parliamentary immunity laws, partly so they can say what they think without fear of prosecution. Twitter is just following this long-standing precedent.
> Actually, many countries have presidential and/or parliamentary immunity laws, partly so they can say what they think without fear of prosecution.
Those laws are a mistake, because sooner or later, you elect a man who revels in being above the law, and who will act accordingly. Yesterday, such a man started a coup, in order to retain power. A few days before that, he was committing election fraud in Georgia. These are serious crimes, the consequences of which he is shielded from.
It's just a modern version of the divine right of kings.
So I can file charges against MPs if I believe that "taxation is theft"? Or the next government can if they don't like my tax laws? Or charge MPs for libel or slander for saying their opinion about something? What if homosexuality is illegal and I say it should be legal, can I be charged then?
These laws exist for a reason. And just because Trump is Trump doesn't mean it doesn't work well most of the time. Remember this is the same man chanting "lock her up" and promised to change libel laws so he could sue everyone and their mother. Do you think he wouldn't have gone after elected officials with lawsuits?
And for most countries these laws are very far from absolute, and/or come with escape hatches.
> So I can file charges against MPs if I believe that "taxation is theft"?
If you are a DA, yes. Private citizens can't file criminal charges. A judge would throw your case out, and you'd probably be disbarred, though. Those are the checks and balances inside our legal system.
If you can't see the difference between POTUS committing a clearly defined crime (Say, election fraud... Or sedition.) and the legal 'theories' of the sovereign citizen movement, I don't know what to say.
> Or charge MPs for libel or slander for saying their opinion about something?
1. You can already do that. Libel and slander are civil cases, and you can sue anyone you want in civil court, for any reason whatsoever, including POTUS.
2. If the courts find it to actually be libel or slander, why the hell not? If an elected official knowingly spreads lies and falsehoods that cause you material harm, you should be entitled to restitution.
> These laws exist for a reason.
Yes, elected officials passed them to protect themselves from legal consequences for their actions.
> And just because Trump is Trump doesn't mean it doesn't work well most of the time.
No, it doesn't work well most of the time. There's a very clear lack of equality under the law in this country - with the executive, its minions, and its friends being very clearly above the law.
> Remember this is the same man chanting "lock her up" and promised to change libel laws so he could sue everyone and their mother.
So, hold on, let's break this down.
We currently have laws that protect the executive from criminal prosecution.
This protection, at the moment, only applies to the current executive, not someone who might become part of the executive in the future.
And you are concerned that weakening these laws will let the current executive attack their future opposition.
... That doesn't make a lick of sense. Prior to getting elected, Trump had no power to 'lock her up'. After Trump got elected, Hillary was no longer protected, because she was not part of the executive.
How exactly is making the sitting president immune to criminal prosecution protect their political opponents from his vindictive behaviour? If anything, it empowers his vindictive behaviour. He is using these laws to protect himself, as he attack his opposition, and prevents a peaceful transfer of power.
And yes, I'm aware that impeachment exists. The impeachment process is a kangaroo court, the impartiality of which would make a Soviet judge blush.
All I'm saying that in general these laws are common, exist in many countries, exist for good reasons, and that Twitter is acting according to their precedent. Are there downsides and is it a trade-off? Sure, most things are.
I'm not really interested about a conversation about various details; especially not if your response is just a flat unnuanced "elected officials passed them to protect themselves from legal consequences". I'm not even talking about the US specifically. The world is larger than the US, and the US doesn't even have MPs. I don't even know the specifics of the US laws on this.
Really? He would seem to be the king of all whales. His extremes draw people to the platform. No doubt countless seniors only ever installed the app so that they could follow trump. Like it or not, he draws in new users.
How about legal exposure, or loss of political goodwill (especially by those who are in positions to provide oversight)? Profitability is impacted by more factors than just raw "number of eyeballs"
In 2017 I saw Twitter advertising in Tokyo’s metro with Trump tweets. Even if their PR said “we don’t like it but it’s in the public interest,” it was obviously in their interest. Twitter has been mentioned daily in the news for the past 5 years, they turned a huge profit thanks the guy.
The only reason they’re acting now is that their excuse is about to expire. If they found another good excuse, Trump would stay.
Back then, it was in everyones interesst. Trump caused controversy, that drove traffic. Same applied for mainstream media and TV, everyone covered im because he drove engangement. The world would be much different, if everybody would just not have covered him and his rallies already in 2016. Everybody did, so.
Covering doesn’t mean letting him speak directly to the public. CNN also let him speak live after the election, but when he started speaking nonsense they interrupted the feed.
What’s happening this week isn’t new, it’s been happening for years.
The election doesn’t delete Trump’s Twitter followers. If anything, twitter’s actions show this was never about profit... but about the fact that no media outlet in the US has ever outright censored a sitting president.
He absolutely is. Trump is the only reason I actually go to twitter at all. The rest of the website is effectively a trash dump. Also if you haven't figured it out. Trump is likely to radically reform the entire republican party. Just because he lost the election doesn't mean he is going out of politics.
Recent events have forced Republican politicians to choose sides clearly rather than sitting on the fence hoping he will go away. This will hopefully severely limit Trumps power in the Republican party in the future.
He will probably not leave politics entirely, though. That would mean being forced to admit that he lost which is beyond his ego.
half the country hangs on trump's every word. to look at it from the other side, consider two Democrats running for office. one gets Obama's endorsement the other gets tarred and feathered. which one stands a better chance to win?
Every single comment on HN is political to varying degrees. The ones decrying politics are, ironically, among the most political; they specifically seek to perpetuate the status quo.
Not sure if you're genuinely asking because you don't know, but the reason is because they have a policy for this (1). Personally, I find it both compelling and reassuring.
They have a public policy written down somewhere, but I'd wager the reasoning is more "we're not going to antagonize individuals who have a direct impact on our bottom line through legislation/prosecution." He lost that card.
Well, perma-banning the president is going to stir yet another round of controversy. Since he's going in two weeks, it seems safer to just wait two weeks and perma-ban the ex president of the United States. (Assuming he and his supporters don't try to take it up another notch in the meantime.)
Because he still has the power and influence to bring up questions over whether or not Twitter is a publisher. Censorship/ostracision is only useful for people that can't fight back. Just like a lot of Trumps deals/leases/accounts will likely be terminated the second Biden is sworn in.
This would be the most dangerous time to do it, funnel all his followers on to a hyper radicalized platform like Gab or Parler right after insurrectionists have literally stormed the Capitol and couldn't be stopped even after police shot one of them.
The smart move is to bide their time slowly backing him down without angering him until January 20th when he no longer has any power to use any lever of power.
A furious Trump issuing a blanket pardon to anyone on Parler after being kicked off twitter could be a real result.
I think this isn't really about his hard-core follower base; those people are kind of lost already, for the moment at least, but rather for the more moderate followers/supporter base, who won't follow him to Gab or whatnot.
IANAL, but I somehow doubt that's how pardons work.
EDIT: What I specifically doubt is that Trump can just write out a pardon for "anyone on Parler". Doesn't it have to be a pardon for someone specific? Or can it be as generic and vague as he wants?
On January 21, 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter grants an unconditional pardon to hundreds of thousands of men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War.
In total, some 100,000 young Americans went abroad in the late 1960s and early 70s to avoid serving in the war. Ninety percent went to Canada, where after some initial controversy they were eventually welcomed as immigrants. Still others hid inside the United States. In addition to those who avoided the draft, a relatively small number–about 1,000–of deserters from the U.S. armed forces also headed to Canada. While the Canadian government technically reserved the right to prosecute deserters, in practice they left them alone, even instructing border guards not to ask too many questions.
That's a specific crime though. If Trump says "I pardon all Parler users for all crimes", can Parler start selling its accounts as a "get out of federal crimes free" card?
Pardons can not apply to future crimes, only crimes already committed and only to those specified at the time of pardon. Someone joining after would need to be pardoned again
Thanks, I should've been more explicit about what I was doubting. I'll go edit my comment so I don't have to repeat the explanation to everyone who decides to reply :)
Look, the guy just wants Poland, so I say we just give it to him. He calms down a bit and we avoid a nasty war. Everybody wins! (Well, except maybe the Poles, I guess.)
Conventionally, at least in Britain, you just say "Peace in our time" (or more correctly "Peace for our time") to invoke this idea. That's what Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said after he landed in Britain with signed agreement from Hitler that there would be no war.
But I suppose that might be unfamiliar to American readers as they did not enter the war at the beginning, and "Peace for our time" was invoked in a different context by JFK.
He still does and always had access to it, but true to character, he wanted to build his own brand and follower base rather than that of the POTUS account which will be closed and archived once he is dethroned.
This was the right move by Twitter at the right time.
If they had blocked his account years, or even months ago, they would have had maintained no credibility as a platform, in the pocket of the left, etc.
If they don't take a stand now, they're all but complicit in perpetuating this [riot? attempted coup? insurrection?]
That said, people should be careful what they wish for: we don't want a couple of powerful media platforms deciding which speech is considered permissible and which isn't. They have to be very conservative in their approach or these platforms will cease to carry any authority.
I am not sure what’s the point of this snarky comment. Are you implying that antifa and similar so-called far-left movements are incapable of organizing?
This seems evidently false. Some examples of such organizations are By Any Means Necessary and Refuse Fascism. Both are formed by various anarchists, Trotskyists and other radical (in the sense of wanting to radically change the current organization of society) leftists. Both fight against Trump administration and for LBTGQA+ rights and various forms of socialism.
The current bar is someone fanning the flames but then gives a concessionary call for peace. It should be easier to find than people explicitly instigating violence.
Not BLM/Antifa but Lijian Zhao (Chinese diplomat) posted a doctored image of a soldier holding a knife to a child’s throat with the message: “Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers. We strongly condemn such acts, &call for holding them accountable.” (https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1333214766806888448). Twitter didn’t even bother to post a disclaimer (like they do with Trump’s tweets) and ignored the request of Australia’s PM to delete the tweet.
An image that is obviously not a photo. The dude is literally standing on a large puzzle board. It's a reference to something that actually happened, and clear it's not an actual photo... Should political cartoons also be removed in your opinion?
I don’t think it’s obvious at all, especially when you view it on a mobile. You can also see the words Morrison used to describe the post: “truly repugnant, deeply offensive, utterly outrageous. The Chinese government should be totally ashamed of this post. It diminishes them in the world’s eyes. It is a false image and a terrible slur on our defense forces.”
As for whether the post should be removed.. well, I’m personally against censorship, but if you’re going to remove Trump’s posts then I similarly think this post ought to be removed as well.
Twitter banned him just after he told protestors to go home. His message of deescalation will not reach them, instead they will see he is banned and be further riled up. This is a very dangerous game twitter is playing.
Message of de-escalation? Did you watch the video? One moment he says to go home, the next he says the election was stolen in an unprecedented action against him.
At best it's a mixed message. If you're telling people that the election is actively being stolen, what are your expectations for their response exactly? That they say "aw shucks" and go home?
These are all things Trump actually says, ad verbatim, and has been repeating this for the better part of a year. If these things were true then violence would be a logical, reasonable, justified, and appropriate response to stop a hostile anti-democratic takeover of the country.
Of course, nothing of Trump's claims are true. Not even remotely. Not even a tiny kernel of truth in it.
But you just can't expect people who actually hold this worldview to quietly stay at home. I wouldn't, if this would actually be happening.
As I've said many times before, if the current path continues it's only a matter of time before there is actual real bloodshed, and Trump and his bootlickers can't just wash their hands with "but I said I they had to remain calm!"
And if you look at the cause for all of this ... it's not even a political disagreement really, it's just Trump not being mature enough to accept that a universe exists where he could lose an election. Good heavens all this ruckus for something so petty. Future historians will look back to Trump not too dissimilar to how we look back to Caligula.
> If you're telling people that the election is actively being stolen, what are your expectations for their response exactly?
So the 4 years that Democrats said the election was stolen, and they illegally stormed the US Capitol at the Kavanaugh hearings, what should we have thought of that?
Basically every organization and politician on the left was supporting that and there was no Twitter censorship.
> Basically every organization and politician on the left was supporting that
not the left. Lots of D politicians, granted. But I can't believe you seriously think that the "the election was fraudulent theatrics" (which I'll take for granted as theatrics, though a more careful treatment is warranted) of D politicians and e.g. Rachel Maddow could ever have had the same effect as these theatrics from Trump and co, which call for armed citizens to take action.
And the citizens weren't armed. The people killed were the unarmed protestors, by the police.
We can imagine what would happen if they had a certain skin color and were protesting a different event. It isn't the reaction that would happen today.
I've seen people on social media in the past few weeks talking about bringing weapons to DC for what happened earlier today. Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested a couple days ago in DC while carrying high capacity magazines [0]. A lot of pictures I've seen of people in the capital building today show them carrying heavy duty zip ties. Why did they have these? Were they planning on taking prisoners/hostages?
We've also seen the reaction to other protests in DC in the last few years. The police response today was much smaller than other recent protests.
Donald Trump's response to statues being torn down was to push for long sentences for people damaging federal property [1]. Has he also pushed for long sentences for people trespassing in the capital buildings and damaging them?
It's totally legitimate to say "I hate Trump and want to see him go", but it's impossible to stand on principle and say "Hey, Stacy Abrams is really in the right to say that her election was fraudulent forever" but Trump can't say the same.
It puts Twitter in the position of legitimizing certain claims of fraud and discounting others in national elections. That's frightening, and people supporting this should think what an alternate world would look like where billions of people were on Parler and not Twitter.
Hillary Clinton conceded immediately, and the Democratic party did not launch a wave of legal challenges to the election results. The argument that the extreme Russiagate types were making was that Russian agents and bots on social media had convinced people to vote for Trump. There were none of these unbelievably absurd claims about manufactured ballots etc.
” Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.”
I would "object" to Trump doing so in the sense that I would judge it to be the rationalizing behaviour of an egomaniac. Which is exactly my reaction to the linked statements by Hillary Clinton.
It is still absurd to act like there is an equivalence between her claiming that Russian interference misled voters into choosing the "wrong" candidate, vs. Trump (a) claiming that ballots were manufactured, altered or tampered with and that actual voting infrastructure and processes are corrupt, (b) having his legal team launch a bunch of frivolous lawsuits in various states, and (c) pressuring the secretary of state of an electorally-close state to overturn election results.
Clinton's statements, as overblown as they may have been, were just an accusation of unfairness, not calling for the results to be overturned and the loser installed in office. All of the #resistance rhetoric was about the need to defeat Trump through the electoral process, or through parliamentary procedures (based on his actions after taking office). Again, there is a fundamental difference between claiming that voters were lied to, and claiming that the government itself directly interfered in the voting process without ANY remotely credible evidence to back that claim.
Trying to equate the two situations because they both involved the use of the word "illegitimate" is beyond laughable.
One is a coordinated scheme to influence impressionable voters backed by evidence. The other is a claim of election fraud with zero evidence. Not the same thing.
If Trump claimed the election was stolen in 2022, nobody would accuse him of a coup attempt that needs freedoms curtailed. The treatment is different because the intention is different, Clinton was throwing mud while Trump seems to want to stay in power.
Maybe they could gather the media into one room in the White House and tell them all the things the President wants them to know. I bet reporters would show up every day to something like that.
I'm sure he does want that but he's not entitled to it. If he wants to use Twitter he should follow the same ToS as everyone else. If he doesn't like them he can use something else.
There's nothing about that that message that was a message of de-escalation. He literally told the insurrectionists that he loved them and that the election was a fraud.
Your timeline is wrong. The hiding of the tweets and the account lockdown happened after the police had already begun to re-take the Capitol; I want to say several hours later.
Twitter left up the message telling people to go home, and took down the tweets saying they were special people doing important work, that the election was actually a landslide victory for him, and was being stolen.
The message they removed for violating their rules stated-- after repeating the stolen election blather that he's been spinning for the last month--:
"We have to have peace. We have to have law and order we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anybody hurt. [...] We have to have peace. So go home, we love you, you're very special, you've seen what happens you've seen the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.
Knowing this, do you believe that it was still the right move to suspend his account over this particular video rather any of hundreds of prior cases or-- no doubt-- the hundreds of opportunities which would arise in the coming months?
Do we want Twitter (or Facebook, or whatever) to "carry any authority"?
Nobody in US politics has benefited more from Twitter and Facebook than Trump himself. Anything that makes us stop relying on those as sources of fact or reasoned political discussion sounds like it has a high chance of being a good thing to me.
Twitter gets a lot of their value from all sorts of official accounts, many of which are government agencies. E.g. the last time I applied for a passport, Twitter was the only support channel available (they had a "live chat" page on their website as well, but it was broken). That's not right - what if I'd been subject to one of Twitter's arbitrary bans?
Is there a requirement to only use platforms that are available to all citizens? I imagine people can be blacklisted by ISPs and/or mobile carriers. Even a landline contract is not guaranteed, right? What they can't do is turn people away at various offices.
That said, I agree this kind of selective platform favoritism is (currently very minimally, but still) discriminatory. For example some people might not want to use Twitter for ideological reasons. (Let's say because it's a fucking cesspool that just generates tension.)
I've said it in another comment, this is a very dangerous move by Twitter. The next Trump (and there probably will be a next Trump) will know from the very beginning in his mandate to neutralise companies like Twitter.
If you mean by removing section 230, then wouldn't that just make everything much worse?
When reading up about it, it seems like websites like twitter would have to either completely remove all types of moderation or get strict enough moderation that user comments would be unfeasible to allow.
I don't see how that would accomplish anything but remove the social media sector from USA.
Although I have yet to hear anyone's theory on what it could be replaced with.
No, I think the next Trump will do what Putin did with VKontakte and will take the company directly from the owners' hands (there are numerous ways to do that even in a Western democracy, the hostile takeover has practically been invented in the US). Of course he (most probably will be a "he") won't do that directly, one of his business friends will help. Things like "removing section 230" are just syntactic sugar that keep us programmers/geeks busy by barking at the wrong tree.
Trump being on Twitter is good for business. Everyday is another car crash and they’re the news station.
Trump lost so the best way to maximize attention/profit is to shake things up on Trump’s way out. Ie start applying the rules to him with enough time for him to react to it before the end of his presidency. This seems like a highly calculated move with only one motive, and it isn’t the good of the people.
These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!
I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!
Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!
These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.
Why is it that every time Donald Trump makes a statement like this, there are always large numbers of his supporters who believe he's still encouraging their bad behavior? I'd say he either knows what he's doing or his communication skills are dangerously bad for a politician. Am I missing a third option?
The President often communicates via Twitter. Not sure where you'd get non verbal communication, like body language, in those cases. For the rest, do you believe he is aware of this and doing it intentionally or is he subconsciously revealing his real beliefs and intentions?
It’s quite ironic that people think this is a first amendment or censorship issue when the real first amendment issue would be if Twitter were not allowed to do this.
The tricky question is whether twitter is in essence a public square. Arguably they've made a new space - governed by nothing but their own corporate policies.
I mean, if conversations on twitter are akin to conversations in a public park in the USA, then you would expect the same social / legal conventions to hold on twitter as in public spaces. If I incited violence in the local park, there are norms and laws that come into play. Arguably the same laws should hold on twitter. From that perspective, its weird that a tech company acts as the judge and jury - rather than the police and the courts. And complaints about censorship make total sense.
But if you think of twitter, google, facebook etc as corporate serfdoms, then there's no problem with twitter's enforcement. Twitter is a space owned and ruled by a tech company. You rent your twitter account, but own nothing. Twitter can set any rules they like, or set no rules and act entirely capriciously. The interesting question is whether or not we want the internet to work like a weird echo of the middle ages. And what (if anything) we should do about it.
"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us.
I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the capitalist structure in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives." [1]
> The tricky question is whether twitter is in essence a public square. Arguably they've made a new space - governed by nothing but their own corporate policies.
Public squares do not have corporate policies. Twitter has never been a public square they've always enforced speech rules from the beginnings.
Correct, but the spirit of the law says that it should be universally accepted. Otherwise we'll all end up like in Orban's Hungary, with almost all the media technically in private hands but practically speaking in Orban's pockets (if I'm not mistaken a similar thing is now happening in Poland).
The spirit of the law says that it should be universally accepted
No it doesn't. In the U.S., the law is explicitly clear that censorship by the government is subject to strict limitations, but censorship by private parties is part of those parties' exercise of their own rights to free speech. Compelling one person to spread the speech of another person is a form of censorship that censors the former's opposition to the latter's speech.
There are only a handful of cases that compel private parties to tolerate speech they disagree with on their own property (basically, malls), and the scope has been narrowed over time. (See Pruneyard and subsequent cases.)
I've just mentioned a concrete case of how one can subvert the letter of the law in order to suppress said free speech, with no free speech you have a very high risk of returning to tyranny (to use one of the terms most feared by the guys who wrote the Federalist Papers), and it is my understanding that that fear (among a very few others) permeates the whole basic law of the United States (i.e. its Constitution).
Things like "private parties", property rights, I'd say that even the idea of "government", come after that fear has been dealt with.
Trump was America's Orban, if I understand what you were saying. Forcing Facebook, Twitter, et al, to carry his speech, as putative head of the U.S. government, is the tyranny and censorship that you should be railing against, because it violates FB's and Twitter's constitutional rights not to transmit violent speech that they disagree with.
Private property, private rights, and government, have all existed before the "fear" (whatever it is you mean by that) was dealt with.
> have all existed before the "fear" (whatever it is you mean by that) was dealt with.
I'm talking about the basis of the US Constitution, its "spirit", so to speak. My reading of the Federalist Papers is that one of the main reasons-to-be of the Constitution was to avoid tyranny, the men that wrote that thing down put things like respecting private property or even what form of government to use after that. I admit, maybe I'm wrong on that interpretation (I've read them about three years ago), but I've recently started reading a selection of Anti-federalist Papers and I stand by my opinion.
> FB's and Twitter's constitutional rights
Again, there was nothing in the Federalist Papers (nor in the Constitution) about respecting the rights of private, abstract, soulless entities. Yes, I know about the relatively recent decision that gave those corporations a "political soul" (so to speak), but that decision had nothing to do with the original spirit of the basic law on which the USA was founded.
There are still independent media in Poland. (like third most watched TV station, Discovery-owned TVN) (though ruling party likely looks how to buy them; eg. recently national oil company bought publisher of several local newspapers)
Nearly every media institution has reported on every development of the Assange case as it happened, including this past week, when they all covered the latest outcome in the case.
And there has been no further news, so the news media moved on to other news, like the siege of the U.S. Capitol building.
> censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
Why do you conflate any discussion of censorship and freedom of speech with the First Amendment of the US’s constitution?
The folks that are pro-private company censorship always do that. It's the only way their argument works so they have to avoid the nuance that free speech has a law and a principle.
It's constant to read opinions like that in threads like this. We used to have this argument in the 60s where private businesses argued they didn't have to serve blacks since they were a private business. Political speech/activity is protected when it comes to labor law. It's not hard to see the law updated at some figure point. Discrimination is discrimination in my book, and free speech is paramount even the most repugnant opinions.
Twitter suspending/banning for violations of policy is discrimination in the same way barkeeps throwing unruly patrons out of the bar is discrimination.
Depends on the policy. Obviously harassing or obscene speech is one thing and even the government is free to restrict it in certain ways (eg. you're not allowed to scream obscenities in public.) Viewpoint-based discrimination is given much more scrutiny, however, and there's a good argument that that's what Twitter et. al are engaging in. Which is less like "throwing unruly patrons out" and more like "calling people whose ideas you dislike unruly and then throwing them out", which is obviously discriminatory.
Only if the barkeep walks past a hundred other patrons at least as unruly as that one patron is, and the barkeep's history suggest he's spending most of his time focusing on the unruly patrons that he disagrees with politically. All while his policies and public statements claim otherwise.
So then I guess McCarthyism was completely ok. Why would Hollywood be compelled to hire leftist sympathisers, and let then disseminate their ideas through their productions.
It's obviously not a first amendment is since that restricts what the fed gov can do, but it is a free speech issue which is a philosophy thought to be better than censoring opposing ideas. It's a legal issue in regards to section 230 which only protects open platforms from liability from user content. If Twitter whats to be a publisher with editorial authority then they should be held to the same standard as NYT and CNN.
> It's a legal issue in regards to section 230 which only protects open platforms from liability from user content. If Twitter whats to be a publisher with editorial authority then they should be held to the same standard as NYT and CNN.
Nope. User-generated content can be moderated and Section 230 protections still apply:
> With that done, we can discuss the various ways you might have been wrong about Section 230. If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher" […]
again this awful misreading of 230. No, the law explicitly does not demand a platform be 'open', or neutral or censor free. That is completely nuts, because it would imply hackernews and your personal blog would be legally liable publishers as soon as you start to moderate content. Which is obviously silly because any content-specific platform that controls what it serves would be legally liable and effectively unable to operate on the internet.
230 grants platforms both freedom from liability and gives them the ability to moderate. They do not need to pick.
I think most people who say they
This are advocating for 230 to be rewritten, not misreading it. Personally, I think that individual curation of content should be considered an editorial decision, and not simply moderation. Tightly moderated forums where everyone sees the same posts are fine, but twitter/Facebook with their individualized front pages is not.
> they should be held to the same standard as NYT and CNN.
There still are significant distinctions. NYT and CNN have a much smaller number of people publishing news, who are hired and paid for their work. Twitter is just a host with a block button. For example Twitter doesn't have a sign-up hiring interview so anyone could have an account. Another distinction is that Twitter is publish first, ban later while newspapers are filtering before publishing.
Demanding a rule that works for few people to scale to hundreds of millions is wishful thinking. It's a different situation requiring different treatment.
I'm curious: what's the line between Terms of Service and editorial authority?
I don't know the exact wording of section 230. Even if I knew it, it wouldn't help, because I'm not a lawyer.
That's why I don't understand where the line is drawn and why. If the idea is to "protect open platforms from liability from user content", why is it okay to have policies that remove child porn, but not those that remove incitement to hate crimes?
> I'm curious: what's the line between Terms of Service and editorial authority?
IANAL: prior approval prior to posting.
If an employee of the publisher is in the 'chain of command' and hits a "Publish" or "Approved" button in the CMS, then it is editorial authority.
If any random yahoo can post something without moderation beforehand, then it is user generated. But the CMS operator could then remove the content after the fact per ToS.
Some people here despise Facebook for privacy concerns, but it's still a useful private network for family and friends not constrained by the message/length format.
Twitter generates so much negativity, so much strife between people who constantly yell at each other over nothing that socially it is the most toxic place on the internet.
As for public officials using Twitter, a private company for their main communication channel instead of using government websites, they need to stop doing that.
> As for public officials using Twitter, a private company for their main communication channel instead of using government websites, they need to stop doing that.
That's a relevant point and I hope every public official would do this. However, what people seem to miss is that Twitter, just like other social media such as Facebook or Instagram, started to, in people's mind, transform into a public agora and lose their private status. The thing is they gained so much power and became so essential and valuable as far as society and political life are concerned that they're now considered as communication channels where everyone, including public officials, should have the right to express their opinion as long as it doesn't break the TOS, which is something I can, in fact, hardly disapprove.
> Twitter generates so much negativity, so much strife between people who constantly yell at each other over nothing that socially it is the most toxic place on the internet.
Glad I'm not the only one that feels that way about twitter. When I first used it and saw all the hate speech and negative comments I was like "who on earth would even use this platform?" It really reminded me of 4chan.
4chan is almost certainly less toxic than Twitter at the societal level. And due to its design (anonymity etc) it may also be less toxic to the average individual participant, in terms of emotional/psychological harm.
The rules are subjective so they are more like whims really.
The President put out a video asking people, in plain language, to go home and co-operate with Capitol police. In this same video he reaffirmed his contention that the election was fraudulent, and said that the protesters were loved. Whether he did this sincerely or as a ploy to increase the likelihood of being obeyed, nobody can say without mind reading powers.
One camp will say this video can be interpreted as harmful because it contains the claim that the election was fraudulent
Another camp will say you are allowed to hold the position that the election was fraudulent and at the same time condemn violence.
Twitter has chosen to interpret the video to say that there is a risk of violence despite a plain spoken appeal against violence. They are essentially interpreting the meaning of the message in a way that is contrary to the plain language used in the video.
In such a scenario I would probably not treat it as a rule, since this kind of rule can be made up spontaneously and can be used to stop anyone from saying anything really.
I think it should not be celebrated when a corporation decides to enforce arbitrary rules based on its own interpretations of someone else's plain words.
In India recently, a TV commercial depicted an inter faith marriage. This enraged some hindu groups and the ad got pulled because there was a vocal online outcry, calls for boycotts, doxxing, etc. The corporation protected itself from the negative externality.
I'm all for it, but I recognise what is also happening as a result.
While in the above case it's the corporation pulling its own ad, and in the Facebook case they're a platform, the end result is the same. Some activist group tells the advertiser not to advertise because their ad equates them to X and X is bad, here are a bajillion deeply offended people.
At Facebook you have employees colluding with activist groups giving them tips on how best they can "effect change" on Facebook policy. Which advertisers to target, which controversies to use in their activism. It's all to bring about the desired political outcome of some radicals - limit the reach of my political enemy or their strongest arguments.
In the USA the religious group doing the activism is not Christianity anymore - back in the 70s and 80s the Christian lobby had the same degree of influence over TV show content. Today there is a secular belief system occupying that same position, with the opposing political party at the helm, much like the religious right of a few decades ago.
You say that as if we our secular nation doesnt have "under god" on our money. The religious right still perturbs liberal democracy in this nation on a vastly larger scale than the so called secular belief system you think has usurped them.
This nation was not formed to protect your speech from the ire public opinion, it was formed to protect it from states, the power that holder monopoly over forceful power.
Little about this seems egalitarian. Had this been a normal persons account it would have been banned ages ago. As practically proven by accounts that mirrored his tweets and did get banned (fast).
I always thought it was obvious they were going to ban him after his time in office was up, it's hard to imagine anything else happening with how they feel about each other.
How big & immediate (powerful) leaders' reach were 200 years ago?
Were they able to send their message to 10s millions of people instantly and lead them to things? or how long would it take them to reach all those people.
I wonder if today's leaders have a very different power compared to when most of these laws and systems were put in place?
In the 1830 King Charles the 10 of France has issued certain proclamations, but nobody found out out because the printers refused to print them, and instead spent their energy and paper on liberal revolutionary materials.
Charles pissed them off a couple days earlier by trying to hoist onerous censorship so they showed him a middle finger.
> Were they able to send their message to 10s millions of people instantly and lead them to things?
No, definitely not. Some states would have had mechanisms for distributing stuff that the leaders wanted publicised, but it wouldn't generally have been all that common. And, in practice, in many cases, if the leader happened to be insane, the system would suppress it. George III wasn't bothering everyone in Britain with weird rants every few hours, say.
The ability of leaders to harangue the general public whenever they feel like it is, in practice, _very_ new; basically since Twitter became popular.
You don't need to go back 200 years even. First Oval Office address was made by Hoover in 1929, less than 100 years ago. Television appearances started happening post-war, first apparently by Truman in 1947, but really more common from 50s onward. In the 18th and 19th centuries you heard what the president said through newspapers, subject to whatever editorial policies each happened to have.
It was less immediate, but anyone who wanted to respond was similarly constrained, so there wasn't much difference in actual power. The coup against Peter III of Russia is an instructive historical example; Catherine couldn't instantly send her message everywhere, but neither could anyone else, so she just had to visit power centers one by one and convince them that she was in charge.
Mention of Russian coups reminded me of the following quite relevant Lenin quote[1] that for some reason was repeated enough times by Soviet media to be easily recognizable by anyone born in the USSR:
"Our three main forces—the fleet, the workers, and the army units—must be so combined as to occupy without fail and to hold at any cost: (a) the telephone exchange; (b) the telegraph office; (c) the railway stations; (d) and above all, the bridges."
The real story, to me at least, is the rampant, completely unfounded and roundly debunked claims of election fraud making there way here in this thread in Hacker News. The ability of people to completely fabricate their own reality in order to confirm their own biases and reinforce their prejudices is absolutely astounding.
As many have said, far too little too late. It's easy to do now he's on his way out out. Still had four years of milking the cash cow beforehand.
At least we know where Twitter stands now, unless you are literally involved in an actual insurrection against your own government, you won't get banned as a US president.
Twitter is a toxic force in society on balance. I'm glad I quit.
These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
I think I get the logic. "Go home" is de-escalating, but "sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long" is repeating the same claim that's stoking the madness, and repeating it in very incendiary terms. Yeah, it might be reasonable to ban that.
No, it's not implicit. Why is your football analogy reasonable at all? There is also the matter of the general pattern of conduct that president Trump has established over the last few months, which is more relevant here. If you tell people that the election is being stolen and as patriotic Americans they ought to do something about it, as he has been doing, and you keep saying that for quite a while, you then lose the claim that there is an implicit "despite" in anything you say, especially since the call to civility is such a small part of the tweet. If you look at all the other things he's said the calls to civility are also quite small and token there too. Like most people, if he wanted to say it he's quite capable of saying it properly. So it's not implicit, it's just a rhetorical tactic he uses.
You're making the case that Trump is inciting violence despite him explicitely deescalating, based on literally how many words were spent on deescalating vs. anything else, among other things. I think just the fact that this is such a hair-splitting discussion makes it very evident Twitter shouldn't have banned him for "severe violations".
This will be an extremely unpopular comment and will probably be the end of my ability to post on HN, but it needs to be said:
What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship. When you take away the ability of people to participate in peaceful political discourse, you push them towards violence. Half of the American electorate currently feels profoundly unheard. They've lost their public voice and their ability to vouch for themselves, which has enabled mass media to flood every publication channel with parodies of them. The longer this continues, the greater the risk of violence will become. You can't make people's beliefs go away by silencing them.
The actions today were dictated from the top, by a large portion of Republican leadership. They created the lies, promoted them, and made sure the people heard them wherever they could reach them. It's not the media's fault for taking action against these lies, and in doing so offended people so much that they had to resort to sedition.
It's absurd to me to hear that people just needed to talk it out more openly! If only someone could nicely tell them the truth! As if all these people were discussing things in good faith and would listen to reality about their conspiracy theories. Must we really coddle and give a voice to dangerous conspiracy theorists that have steadily gotten more and more extreme and violent? They are being groomed and egged on by Republican leadership - surely that's the source of the problem, and one that nobody seems to be able to do anything about.
Regarding the Russian collusion... manafort is in jail over those crimes. Flynn and others were charged with obstruction of justice. You don't obstruct justice because it's fun and dandy.
The trump campaign and admin has made huge efforts to cover up crimes relating to it's behavior with respects to Russia. What exactly are they hiding?
I personally believe it isn't as deep as it seems, but it is also very serious. I don't think Trump is given orders by Russia, or that there was deep cooperation. However, even somewhat of coordination and discussions of sensitive information is criminal.
So yes, the Russian collusion narrative is entirely true. The only reason Trump wasn't charged with obstruction of justice is because of a memo saying they shouldn't charge their boss, not because there isn't enough evidence.
One of the big differences between what happened in Portland and DC is INTENT. The insurrectionists yesterday intended on forcing the joint session to declare Trump the winner of the presidential election. They were attempted to do by force what they failed to do at the ballot box, and at the court house. The fact they were inept and failed does not excuse them at all.
That does not compare even slightly to what happened in Portland. Protests that turns into riots aren't good. However, there was not an intent to overthrow the presidential election there at all.
>The actions today were dictated from the top, by a large portion of Republican leadership. They created the lies, promoted them, and made sure the people heard them wherever they could reach them.
None of this is tantamount to incitement, or sedition. Which is why despite whatever bloviating we're not going to see any prosecutions of public officials (at least not regarding the Republican efforts to contest the election.) This is 2020's version of "Lock Her Up!"
These sorts of rhetorical exaggerations are contributing to the problem, and are scarcely better than the outright lies on the other side.
Right, except the protesters were sheep led by Trump and his Republican goons. This was nothing short of a failed coup. That can't be an exaggeration.
Stephen Colbert did a great job of bringing this up in his interview with ex-prosecutor Sen. Klobuchar who went straight back to work with her traitor colleagues. She dodged the question of whether more public officials should be prosecuted with a tactful deflection of laying it all on Trump. That bugged me.
>This was nothing short of a failed coup. That can't be an exaggeration.
Yes it can be, given that Republicans have always framed their arguments in terms of "preventing electoral fraud" and not "overthrowing democracy." You may personally feel like the former is a pretextual cover for the latter but you probably wouldn't be able to prove this in a court of law.
Setting aside completely how I feel because it absolutely does not matter, the question should be, was it the latter or wasn't it?
> but you probably wouldn't be able to prove this in a court of law.
Exactly. And for this to be the standard for how we certify the truth is at the heart of American absurdism. It's how we let politicians, big banks, Wall Street, et al get away with being full of shit. And I am not exaggerating. The partisan impeachment vote, Wells Fargo's fake bank account, and the financial crisis are all examples of absurdism.
Here is Matt Gaetz after the raid. Do you know why they applaud? Because he gave them the well formed arguments they need to get away with betraying their country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfmyACLmZ7s
It's not merely that the prosecutions aren't going to happen, it's that they're not going to receive widespread support among legal experts because that's the tricky thing about the law - you can't just throw people in jail based on tribal hatred, you have to actually assert a definition of concepts like "sedition" or "incitement" or "terrorism" that apply universally and are prosecuted consistently. And there's not going to be a functional definition of these terms that applies especially to the speech of Republican politicians or rioters in the past couple months.
I am not talking about tribal hatred or matters of perspective or what the public thinks or votes about anything here.
I am talking about the masterminds and their intent. Trump clearly intended to steal the election. Wells Fargo and Wall Street clearly intended to cheat for profit.
It's as if intent doesn't matter, when it truly is the source and agency of the bad actors. Wrongful intent continues to enjoy protection in America under the "tricky things about the law", to borrow your words.
You shouldn't be able to steal something just because the lawyers agree with you. In America, that's how it's done (probably everywhere else too, but).
Trump has always gotten away with the things he was gravely incompetent at on the basis of his incompetence. This is just another case. He was pushing Pence to use power he didn't have. His allies all pushed the fraud narrative. And he provoked a riot that proceeded to follow his orders and storm the capital.
This is what a weak coup looks like in 2020 America. None of the action above were based on preserving order or upholding the constitution or fullfilling his oath of office or protecting our democracy or being in the right. It was a power grab doomed from the start, but never the less, a power grab and a sorry attempt at a coup.
That's an interesting and reasonable perspective. If you stretch the definition of a coup to include totally incoherent, incompetent, ineffectual raging that could never actually achieve the outcome, it could qualify. But it still feels like a stretch to me based on what I know of coups (sadly some personal experience there).
I also think calling it a coup inflames tensions and risks credibility for no real benefit. A sober and precise description of events is damning enough.
The struggle over vocabulary is evident. The truth is it could be called all or none of these things. There was a professor on NPR who also said how each term (terrorism, insurrection, coup) has legal connotations. But I call BS on all of it. Getting people to not say coup is already evidence of damage control against the factual, universal, objective, scientific "coup-ness" nature of it all. Semmantics is always arguable, but I am not lying, I have no agenda, and I am not gaming anything with how I express the situation. Like with most "normal" people with no power or say in the situation.
But of course, whether anything crosses legal lines in accordance to legal vocabulary is all these bent politicians are concerned about, because that's the only thing that would stop them by landing them in jail. That's why most of them are lawyers. The non-lawyers have a hard time surviving. We'll see what happens with Trump.
Some of the Republican leadership, including the President, have presented evidence of election irregularities. Much of this evidence is worrisome, even if it does not impact a single vote. For instance - if you run a poll monitoring system and the county operations team cheers and claps when one party's monitors are asked to leave, it does not inspire confidence in the process. If you rely on a voting machine vendor whom both parties have expressed strong reservations against, it does not inspire confidence either.
When people do not have confidence in the most basic aspect of democracy, you start to see what you did in DC. Regardless of party or country. Absolutely nothing has been done to assuage these concerns, and most responses have been dismissive. It is most likely going to reoccur whenever something like this happens.
When you examine the specific actions here, the President's remarks immediately prior to the incident exonerate him because he said in plain language to "peacefully and patriotically protest at the Capitol". There is no way to credibly accuse him of inciting a mob to be violent, but one could certainly accuse him of inciting a protest. This would not be unusual since there have been many peaceful protests at the Capitol during supreme court hearings and gun control related protests.
Who do you trust to supply you with "objective facts" about politics? Why not at least take a look at the New York Times article? Are you afraid you'll forget you don't trust them and take everything at face value?
Even if you don't trust the journalists and editors at the NYT, the article links to primary sources from the US Supreme Court, Wisconsin Supreme Court, Pennsylvania Department of State and more so you can do your own research.
As a non-Trump-supporter who doesn't trust the mainstream media, where do you get your objective facts about politics? Do you just watch CSPAN or something? It seems like you'd miss out on a lot of important news that way.
There are powerful reality filters embedded in the culture of organisations, of classes of people, and with political groups. It is extremely difficult to tease things apart and find the truth in this environment. By exposing yourself to a source you are opening yourself to be being unduly swayed by that source. Unless I am prepared to sit down and investigate the story, the sources found in the story and follow up with my own research, then I will not expose myself to it.
I have not investigated this story thoroughly, but I have tried to get to the bottom of many other stories. Usually at the bottom I find uncertainty. I find lack of evidence. Confusion, bending, warping of reality to fit an agenda. There so much noise it's almost deafening.
"Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see". We are like children in the school playground spinning tales for each other. Imprinting our own thoughts and values and goals into the stories we tell. Barely aware of our own motives.
There are rules for poll monitors. They have to follow specific rules and laws to participate. They cannot talk to workers. They can only ask questions to supervisors and inspectors only. They cannot be disruptive. I mean how would you like to be trying to count things and get interrupted by "poll monitors"?
That is what happened here. The GOP poll monitors kept on breaking the rules and acting like asses. And they were eventually kicked out, totally legally and according to the rules they signed up for. And the Democratic poll watchers clapped, which may be 'unseemly' but isn't proof of "elections irregularities".
The president, with the 1/4 billion he raised, the full support of the GOP and their allies and supporters _at every level of every government_ and with the backing of the federal government were unable to raise a lawsuit that could convince even judges appointed by Trump. If there was evidence of fraud that could sway the election they would have found it, period. They didn't, ergo it doesn't exist.
The reason people didn't have confidence in the most basic aspect of democracy is because they have been lied to endlessly. Without ANY knowledge of how the system works, they took these lies at their face value. Many things were done to assuage those concerns, and they dismissed the evidence out of hand.
For example, Georgia.... does paper ballots counted by optical tabulators. They did a by-hand recount. The hand-counted totals matched the machine tabulation. This totally rules out any computer or machine problems. But people STILL bring up the 'dominion changed the votes' lies.
And you are encouraging it with your irresponsible comment. You're feeding the lies, by encouraging a sense of 'uncertantity' when there is NOT uncertantity. The GOP Secretary of State in Georgia just presided over 2 elections which delivered major Democratic wins. Suggesting that he is 'on the take' just illustrates the sheer desperation of the losers of this election will take to cast any shadow of doubt on anyone if it comforts the sting of their loss, even as they know that their wild accusations will never have an end, and now resembles a literal witch hunt. When your cast of enemies has to grow to include the GOP leaders in the Senate, and the VP, both of who have endlessly protected Trump, then you really don't have reality on your side.
Based on polling there are plenty of folks in both parties who think things were fishy with the election. I am confident that if you took each claim and systematically argued it out in public you would have seen that number go down drastically to an insignificant one.
I think GOP lawmakers had the right idea to hold some kind of public audit of it. Giuliani had a lot of incorrect / blatantly false facts and so he was dismissed out of hand, but many of his witnesses came across as credible and describe things very differently from your explanations.
Logistically I don't think anyone wanted to back the election fraud argument for political reasons but there is still very much a need for it because plenty of people feel like it was stolen.
As for the President - whether he's making it up or whether he's among those who believe it was stolen, nobody reads minds so you cant know one way or another unless you add your own personal bias into it.
Now you can be very angry about the fraud claims because they are baseless etc and be emotional about it or be a problem solver and recognize that those people are fellow citizens and there is no divorce option. Railing against Trump 24x7 actually makes the problem worse because nobody is going to be persuaded. You can also call me also irresponsible for bringing their concerns up, but what you can't really do without being dishonest is to deny that there are millions who believe this stuff, out of whom a few dozen got mad enough about it want to break in to the Capitol, and succeeded.
The fact remains that the media does a tremendous disservice to the public by not casting a wide tent, and the President capitalised on this because frankly what other option is there if you want to win? The American media hoaxed the public into thinking he called Nazis very fine people when he instead said they should be condemned totally, and was said in the context of the broader debate about statues of controversial historical figures.
Now you can again cheerlead for the media and say they are the finest journalists on the planet, but the fact is that more than half the country doesn't believe them. You can dismiss them all as brainwashed or stupid or whatever you like but they're going to be around for a very long time.
> It's absurd to me to hear that people just needed to talk it out more openly! If only someone could nicely tell them the truth! As if all these people were discussing things in good faith and would listen to reality about their conspiracy theories. Must we really coddle and give a voice to dangerous conspiracy theorists that have steadily gotten more and more extreme and violent?
Blue-collar America (manufacturing, middle class) used to be a pretty stalwart blue supporting constituency. Now this group is welcoming populism and is pretty red. We've seen not just jobs but entire INDUSTRIES shipped abroad to the lowest bidder (it's cheaper to make something with slave labor, of course).
You might not care to "listen" but I think they have something interesting to talk about.
Sure, I'm not saying people who vote republican don't have important issues in mind. But those issues aren't censored - they are mainstream non-partisan talking points. That's all I heard about for the past 6 years, from both parties. It's not exactly taboo to talk about trade.
But if a party dilutes their message by embracing conspiracy theories, outlandish lies, bigotry, and authoritarian rhetoric, then what the hell? How is political discussion supposed to be in good faith anymore? If people want to talk to me about trade, they can talk to me about trade on whatever platform they want. I listen to them all the time. If they want to talk to me about how voting machines are rigged by Hugo Chavez, then they're probably not going to say, "oh, your right" when I show them facts that say otherwise.
When "let us go back to work, my family is starving and we're going to lose the house!" is characterized as "they just want to get haircuts!" it's worse than censorship. It's mockery of people's suffering.
Move down the hierarchy of needs a bit and listen to what people are discussing. It's not trade policy.
Lets be clear though, those people would have been better supported such that they wouldn't have needed to make a choice between eating and the pandemic if the outgoing Federal government hadn't made such a mess of their response (and refused point blank to support state and local governments who cannot borrow).
What does any of that have to do with storming the capital building and attempting to halt the election process? There were no protest signs looking to be heard about this issue or that, only Trump flags, union jacks and maga hats.
We're supposed to believe this was a coherent protest for populism and not just sour grapes flamed by the president?
> What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship
Nah, social media was the hub of misinformation and was abused and here we are. What they eventually did was too little and too late. There was a lot of fake news on FB, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit etc. that radicalized all these folks. Platforms like YouTube amplified it because it resulted in more views.
>When you take away the ability of people to participate in peaceful political discourse, you push them towards violence
Nah, the violence is mostly because they believe the election was stolen, based on fake news spread originating from 4chan and then spread on social media and high level politicians.
> You can't make people's beliefs go away by silencing them
But you can restrict the spread. No one objects when phishing scams and fraud targeting the elderly and others are blocked by social media and email platforms, why is there an objection when bullshit qanon and 5g conspiracies are blocked?
There was hardly any blocking on social media till about 2017, and things got way worse with these folks as the right wing and alt right abused the platforms. And now folks like you claim things will somehow get better if fake news is allowed to be spread unrestricted? I don't buy it one bit.
The problem is blocking it almost legitimizes it because they say "big tech" is suppressing the information. It is the same effect you get when you try to ban a book. Everyone wants to read it to get the juicy details.
The way you counter misinformation is by debunking it and showing it is fake.
Nope. Experience with social media shows that this is Empirically untrue.
There is also boat loads of research showing that just seeing false headlines results in people using that information to make decisions - even if they KNOW the headline was retracted.
You can debunk whatever you like, but at that pace of information flow today, this is essentially pissing into the wind.
By the time you have debunked one thing, many other topics have been generated and the conversation has moved on.
Its far easier to create content, and far harder to verify content. Our brains have some easily hackable ways to verify content.
That might have been the case in the past, but debunking something takes a lot more time than creating a fake claim.
We live in a time where one side is spending all their time and energy to create as much fake content as fast as possible. Even if we had infinite time and energy to expose and debunk it all, the attention of the viewer is limited.
As result, we'll never be able to convince people who've read this fake content that what they read is false.
There's only two ways this can end:
1. We block this kind of fake, unverified content
2. We accept living in postfactual times where truth is up to the highest bidder and fake content decides elections.
3. We accept living in postfactual times where truth is up to the people for whom a grasp on the truth is for them an economic imperative.
Mine's not a clear vision, but I imagine this will become a critical issue for a generation and more.
Some future hipsters may come to see Donald Troll as a useful harbinger.
The genie isnt going back in the bottle. Your 1. is not happening. Just consider who we would need to be, in a future world of effectivly infinite information channels.
Your 2. Is unappealing but appears to be a false dichotomy.
We don't know how best to proceed: interesting times. Let's remain open to various possibilities, especially if driven by ICT.
Where do you draw the line? Should posts saying lockdowns don't work be blocked? How about posts saying masks don't work? Being against mandatory vaccination should be blocked or not?
> No one objects when phishing scams and fraud targeting the elderly and others are blocked by social media and email platforms, why is there an objection when bullshit qanon and 5g conspiracies are blocked?
I do object to both. Breaking end to end communications on the internet is censorship.
If you are set up to censor phishing, you are set up to censor dissent when the state puts a machine gun in the face of your sysadmin.
This will be an extremely unpopular comment and will probably be the end of my ability to post on HN
Pre-emptive victim posturing to gain sympathy for your argument. Do better.
What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship. When you take away the ability of people to participate in peaceful political discourse, you push them towards violence.
Bullshit. I've deplatformed quite a lot of people. It doesn't happen by accident, someone has to be openly promoting genocide or the like before I'm willing to spend time, effort, and reputational capital in pushing them out of the room.
Half of the American electorate currently feels profoundly unheard.
Why, did they accidentally mute Fox News, OAN, or talk radio? There's an entire industry based around airing the grievances of Trump and the sort of people who support him.
The GP starting off by painting himself as the underdog about to speak out against all us hiveminded folks is a more severe violation of the rules than the parent pointing it out.
How it could be that half of the population is deplatformed and censored when the most popular media(Fox) in that country caters for that demographic, had elected a president and the president was in power for 4 full years when the events happened, the events were organised by the said president?
What else these people demand? Not being called out for their behaviour?
What kind of platform they are looking for? What exactly could be changed to de-victimise those people?
People being relegated to digital ghettos (Parler) is not a sign of healthy discourse. This is about individuals not feeling like they can speak publicly.
There are both right and left leaning subs on reddit and it works ok.
Reddit occasionally bans subreddits for various reasons (see r/fatpeplehate and the predecessor to r/hydrohomies). True, r/thedonald was banned, but not because of political leaning (r/conservative is running just fine), but because of how it was spreading misinformation and calling for violence.
>There are both right and left leaning subs on reddit and it works ok.
But for any given sub that isn't political, there probably are not right and left-leaning subs. And given that viewpoint-based moderation is overwhelmingly-common on Reddit, this means that on non-politics based subreddits then engaging on any political issue as a right-leaning individual carries a decent risk of getting some sort of wrongthink ban. It's extremely common, sadly, and even though one can avoid politics entirely it's hard to just watch people circlejerk and mock people who hold your views when these issues do arise.
Being told that you are unwanted in a community and shown the door is not censorship. It is simply a matter of that community signaling that you are not welcome and telling you to leave.
Any community is free to set its own rules for who they consider welcome and you are more than able to join or create an alternative community where you feel more welcome.
That said, claiming that only right-leaning folks are being mocked or told to leave communities is highly disingenuous. Think about being a liberal/left-leaning gun owner and trying to participate in the vast majority of gun forums online. Or hunting forums. Or a lot of survivalist/bushcraft forums. Or militaria forums. Or car forums.
>Being told that you are unwanted in a community and shown the door is not censorship.
Didn't claim it was.
>That said, claiming that only right-leaning folks are being mocked or told to leave communities is highly disingenuous. Think about being a liberal/left-leaning gun owner and trying to participate in the vast majority of gun forums online.
I didn't claim this either, and quite frankly your eagerness to put words in my mouth is telling. In any case I'd be surprised if most gun forums that aren't on Reddit will just straight-up ban you for being liberal. But Reddit's viewpoint-based moderation goes much deeper than in subreddits that have ancillary ties to politics; for example it's very common for regional-based subreddits to have viewpoint-based discrimination that excises conservatives. If this is egregious enough it can cause schisms where you get left-wing/right-wing versions of the same sub, but usually that doesn't happen.
I do think you're leaving out a lot of contaxt when claiming that simply posting as a right-leaning individual in a non-political subreddit will somehow get you banned. Unless you're directly attacking others or posting really hateful stuff, getting banned will first involve some kind of escalation and very often also one or more moderators asking to tone it down or disengage. If you decide to stick to your guns at that point instead of taking a break, that's when forced timeouts and bans start to happen.
As an example of you probably leaving out a lot of context, you used the phrasing "wrongthink ban", which almost always goes hand-in-hand with (false) claims of being censored.
You also wrote that engaging in political discussion from a right-leaning viewpoint in non-political subreddits "carries a decent risk of getting some sort of wrongthink ban".
Dragging politics into spaces where they're not welcome is a bad idea, and will quite rightly upset the people in those spaces. It's their space and they get to choose what is welcome in it. Someone trying to forcibly insert themselves or their viewpoints into other people's space, when they are not welcome, is bound to create friction and anger.
Reddit doesn't promise that anyone has any right to participate in whichever subreddit they want to. That is up to the users and moderators of any given subreddit, no matter how arbitrary their rules may seem. You are free to find other subreddits to participate in. If your politics or general attitude is generally so that you find yourself unwelcome in most subreddits, that should be an indicator to perhaps be a little more diplomatic yourself, honestly. Or just disengage from Reddit entirely, you'll be fine without it.
Being of the belief that you should be welcome in all spaces and greeted on friendly terms by everyone is a really privileged position to hold. Not everyone is welcome everywhere.
>Unless you're directly attacking others or posting really hateful stuff, getting banned will first involve some kind of escalation and very often also one or more moderators asking to tone it down or disengage.
Sometimes it will and oftentimes it won't. Again, this is my actual experience, and the experience of many others. If it comforts you to believe that I probably deserved it somehow, that I have to affirm my lived experience over your baseline skepticism, then it's not worth my time to try to shake you from that sort of complacency.
For example, as I relayed elsewhere on this thread, I was recently banned on a travel forum when a discussion of traveling during COVID arose and I took the position that it wasn't obviously selfish/ignorant to travel if officials in all the relevant jurisdictions approved of it. For this I was simply permanently banned, and my modmail inquiries were ignored. Now if you want to assume that I must've laced my posts with racial slurs or whatever I'll tell you that that's wrong but I'm not going to be able to prove it to you. But this is just how things work on many parts of Reddit.
Whenever you are in a space that is not your own, you have to read the room at least to some extent. If your views are against the general views held by the members of that space, you have to choose your words more carefully and present your opinions more diplomatically than if you were in your own space or a space that is at least more in agreement with you.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Not everyone is equally welcome everywhere. Different owners/moderators set different limits, often based on precious situations, which you may not be aware of.
Specifically the argument of doing things that a lot of people consider irresponsible, even if they are not disallowed, is a very sore subject with a lot of people during this pandemic. Authorities in a lot of countries have been way too lax in imposing lockdowns and restrictions, leading to much higher numbers of infected and dead than would otherwise have occurred in the same amount of time.
Odds are that the travel subreddit you mention has seen a lot of people arguing that if there is no travel ban, they should be free to travel wherever they want and however they want, which really rubs a lot of people the wrong way, especially those who have lost loved ones and consider such behavior highly irresponsible. Odds are also that the moderators previously made an announcement or even rule changes prohibiting those sorts of discussions, because of how they rile people up.
In the eyes of the moderator, you transgressed the rules of the subreddit, so they firmly showed you the door. I make no judgment on whether whatever you posted was morally reprehensible, what matters is that the proprietor of that particular space found it so.
Reddit is a collection of many little kingdoms. Some of them have kings that just don't like you, for whatever reason. That's their prerogative and there's nothing you can do about it, except maybe creating a rival subreddit that potentially becomes more popular.
>If your views are against the general views held by the members of that space, you have to choose your words more carefully and present your opinions more diplomatically than if you were in your own space or a space that is at least more in agreement with you.
Yes, and we know what they say about wearing short skirts and sexual assault as well. I know how to read a room, but the point is that the mere fact of the double-standard is offputting.
>Reddit is a collection of many little kingdoms. Some of them have kings that just don't like you, for whatever reason. That's their prerogative and there's nothing you can do about it, except maybe creating a rival subreddit that potentially becomes more popular.
Ultimately I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out how this viewpoint-based moderation creates a bad experience for a lot of people that will lead to their turning to alternatives, and that the scale to which this is happening probably is not just Reddit "working as intended." And it's not like you can just casually jump from say a hobby subreddit that bans all Trump supporters on sight to a right-wing version of the subreddit that offers a remotely-similar experience. My point is a lot weaker than you're acting like it is, which is telling. "Moderators don't act like this, but if they do it's your fault, and if it's not your fault then you need to accept that this is how Reddit works." Do I though?
Interestingly, Reddit has stepped in when moderators have tried to get too forceful with eliminationism - for example, there have been attempts to create shared user blacklists across subreddits but these have largely been quashed by admins.
You bring it up because you were affected by it, I'm not sure you would react in the same way if the tables were turned. There are double standards everywhere, affecting everyone in some way and to different extents. Some face a lot more double standards than others. Consider that your experience is not unique to you nor to those who agree with you politically. Far from it.
> "And it's not like you can just casually jump from say a hobby subreddit that bans all Trump supporters on sight to a right-wing version of the subreddit that offers a remotely-similar experience."
In that case, if you wish to genuinely participate in that particular subreddit, you keep your politics to yourself and stick to the relevant subject matter. You quickly learn to segregate subjects, some forums are fit for one type of discussion, some for other types. Some have a very strict enforcement of tone, some are basically free-for-all.
Even if someone posts a political opinion that you disagree with, you are not obligated to react, in fact reacting may show your hand and sour everyone else to you, for something that is unrelated to the subject matter of the forum.
Discretion is the better part of valor, after all.
None of this really disagrees with anything I've actually asserted. I'm saying "just accept the viewpoint discrimination or leave" is really not an attitude that would be embraced by many. But hey, if you're willing to grant the possible reality of widespread viewpoint discrimination then I'm impressed.
There really is no such thing as "widespread viewpoint discrimination", except the impossibility of genuinely discussing alternatives to capitalism in the US, without resorting to name-calling.
What you're experiencing is simply that you are not automatically welcome in all spaces you try to enter. Some people have experienced that for decades and centuries.
>I think you are confusing right learning opinions with outright racism, anti-Semitism and calling for violence against various minority groups.
I'm not. For example, I was banned like a week ago from a sub for arguing that it's not obviously selfish/evil for someone to travel during COVID if one is allowed to do so. It was on a travel-related subreddit where there were no rules to this effect, but a mod felt that this sort of attitude was tantamount to advocating manslaughter.
Most subs will not have "no conservatives allowed" rules but the enforcement patterns often will not follow the rules.
> but because of how it was spreading misinformation and calling for violence
That's the rhetoric Reddit used but I was completely unconvinced. They spent the better part of a year looking for a reason to ban /r/td, going as far as to invent "quarantining" as a soft-ban, and when they finally did so the cited evidence was extremely unconvincing.
As a very occasional reader of /r/td I saw a lot more accusations of this type of behavior than actual instances of it. Certainly no more so than other extreme subreddits like /r/latestagecapitalism or even /r/politics.
I think those types of subs are/were annoying and filter most of them from my homepage. That said I never found /r/td to be anywhere near egregious as is said here, even the justification for the final banning was incredibly watery.
I was a non reader of T_d, but their front page manipulation was on everyone, you needed no subscription to their sub to be afflicted by their shenanigans.
I mean Reddit changed their algorithms to ensure this never happened again.
T_D was 4chan tier stuff built around “owning the libs” and rubbing it in everyone’s face. The grace of a boozed uncle who wants to dance on your grave.
The other fun part is how long T_D was allowed to run Amok. Special gloves to avoid looking bad, something that’s also forgotten.
If you want to know how bad it is, simply see what their voat/ parler versions look like.
And I’m also not the kind of person who actually did the history digging and detective work on user accounts. This is all passive observation of internet drama.
The T_d crowd was happy with dog whistles and coded racism. For them to find r/politics or any other sub offensive is but natural.
There's right-leaning and then there's racism. Additionally, Reddit has the right to block whatever it wants from its platform, just as the mods here can delete posts etc.
Freedom of speech isn't the right to speak wherever you like. I don't have to let you speak on my lawn, on my stage. You just shouldn't disappear for disagreeing with the government.
To me there's an obvious double standard here: there's a tacit acceptance that social media has the power to actively sway elections (e.g. FB in 2016). How could it be that banning certain political groups from these platforms is not a form of censorship?
To refit your analogy: what if your stage is the only stage there is?
Reddit is absolutely not federated. It's a single centralized site run by a single centralized entity that has the right to censor anything or everything on it at will.
Because left-wing activists run reddit and they enjoy censoring the right-wing. So most get fed up and go to the alt right websites instead.
Guess what they do there? "Hey have you heard about white genocide??" etc.
There are even people that specifically go to reddit to encourage people to leave and go to the alt right website. It is a form of recruiting for the cause so to speak.
That’s exactly the problem. They can’t talk to you and you can’t talk to them. You don’t get to tell them why they’re wrong or work to find common ground anymore. Their ideas are allowed to fester in their protected bubble. This is extremely destructive to democracy and open discourse.
> where, by the way, I probably wouldn’t be able to speak publically.
I had a look at Parler earlier.
People like you are loud and vocal there too, you can start with the parody account Breitfart for example, the difference is that others are allowed to be loud and vocal there too.
So in a way equally bad as Twitter, just a bit more "nuanced" and even more noisy.
You have to discuss with them diplomatically instead of say "haha, dumb trumper" or something similar. There are left-wing trolls that basically do that lol and the right-wing people just leave to go to the alt-right websites instead. Why do you think there are so many of these right-wing "talk shows" on places like youtube?
Then they shouldn't have violated policies that resulted in their account getting banned. They weren't banned for their political beliefs, they were banned in large part because they were doing one of the following: doxxing, harassing, threatening, inciting violence, etc.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was declared bullshit before it was released because the guy who provided it shipped it around to several news outlets including Fox News who initially passed because even their underused fact checking department saw that the entire story fell apart under the lightest of scrutiny.
It does not serve society's interest to have blatant falsehoods broadcast as news.
You’re saying that like the other side hasn’t had to endure the entire Russian conspiracy thing (Steele dossier) for years, which has been thoroughly discredited. It was shared widely and I haven’t seen any mainstream coverage when it got discredited.
If you want to hold social media to certain standards, it should be across the board, not when your side benefits.
Fox is the most popular single media source because it's the only (mainstream) source that "caters for that demographic". Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other sources are actively hostile to that demographic.
What is the argument here? Are they deplatformed unless everyone says the things they like?
Breitbart, a huge network of News Corp, 4Chan, many subreddits, many youtube channels, many podcasts, radio channels etc are all dominated by those people.
Does everyone have to agree with them so they don’t feel deplatformed?
> Deplatform: Prevent (a person...) from contributing to a forum or debate, especially by blocking them on a particular website.[1]
Everytime someone is removed from a platform they've been deplatformed[2]. The existence of a few remaining platforms that aren't participating in that effort doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
And don't be fooled; it is an active, organized effort whose ultimate goal is to make disagreement impossible. Hell, the term for it in the UK is "no-platform", which makes the goal quite clear. You seem to be arguing that movement doesn't exist, simply because it hasn't completely succeeded.
People also feel threatened and silenced when someone else who publicly expresses their point of view is deplatformed for it. Do you really think people don't or shouldn't respond to the deplatforming of other people?
Deplatforming was also problematic on school campuses with anti-free-speech students protesting, disrupting, and aggressively preventing visits by speakers with whom they disagree.
> What we saw today was precipitated by mass deplatforming and censorship.
Seems rather like the opposite: a mob got riled up by misinfo and conspiracy theories that they never would've read or seen if [your outgroup here] were any good at censorship and deplatforming.
I'm 100% with you. I don't care for these people or their politics, but the way the media, politicians, and the public are reacting, this is going to only make this so much worse.
They truly believe there's a deep state that rigged the election. Throwing around using the 25th Amendment, calling them all terrorists committing treason/sedition, is only going to reinforce that the deep state is not only real but using every tool they have to attack them. The constant attempts to silence them by deplatforming and a whole host of other shadowy methods is confirming that the media, big tech, higher education, is full of people that not only despise them but with they would go away forever.
If we keep going down this path I guarantee violence is coming. 50 years from now we'll end up seeing the Oklahoma bombing as the opening salvo to what came next. McVeigh went full terrorist after Waco/Ruby Ridge. Don't give these people the confirmation they're looking for.
>They truly believe there's a deep state that rigged the election.
This is a fallacy. People can convince themselves of pretty much anything with the help of tribalism and leaders willing to lie. That doesn't mean you should sympathize with their desire for violence.
Pre-2016 if you would have asked me "Are electronic voting systems vulnerable to hacking?" I would have said "Absolutely yes." Post 2020 if you ask me "Are electronic voting systems vulnerable to hacking" my answer is still "Absolutely yes"
Weird so many people did some kind of dipsy-doo flip-aroo with elections in 2016/2020.
But the question is not whether they are vulnerable, but whether they were actually abused. Big difference. We have evidence of the former. And virtually no evidence of the latter.
I don't like the machines either. But you can't go from "could have" to "did" without evidence. Luckily where I live I get to vote on paper. It prevents such debates.
Do you remember 2000 and the Diebold controversy? We had an Diebold engineer testifying on record about the deficiencies of these systems. I know it’s been 20 years, but I do think we need to take the integrity of our elections more seriously (and I say that being VERY happy that Trump lost the election).
Well, I don't think anyone claims that electronic voting systems should be the source of truth for vote-count; it's mostly there for convenience and if there is any doubt at all about its integrity, the paper ballots can always (and often are) busted out to be counted by hand.
> They truly believe there's a deep state that rigged the election. Throwing around using the 25th Amendment, calling them all terrorists committing treason/sedition, is only going to reinforce that the deep state is not only real but using every tool they have to attack them.
In the words of Obama in one of his last discourses as president (or perhaps his firsts as ex-president?), "reality has a way of catching up with you". The more your beliefs deviate from reality, the more you're going to be hitting your head against a wall.
What should an appropiate reaction be to people that believe that a deep state rigged the election storming a government building, and a president fueling that?
> What should an appropiate reaction be to people that believe that a deep state rigged the election storming a government building, and a president fueling that?
If the deep state wanted to rig the election in favor of Dems, why not give them a bunch of state governments in 2020 so they can undo the Republicans' house gerrymandering?
Why do they feel "unheard"? Every election results in close to 50% of the voters not getting the candidate they voted for. It doesn't mean their issues weren't discussed.
Now more than ever, anyone can have a voice. A child can make videos unboxing toys and millions will watch. You can tweet, blog, video, write essays, make podcasts and so on. I'm not aware of any point in history when people could be heard more than now.
As can someone pretending to be a child. And they can make 5 accounts pretending to be different people. If it is revealed that they take money from Big Toy then, provided they protected their identity enough, they can just move on to another account.
Our mindset is based around a form of discourse where we stop listening to people when we discover they're using their free speech to lie. Now you don't know who the liars are.
> Every election results in close to 50% of the voters not getting the candidate they voted for.
Every election in the USA. Plenty of countries manage to have a proportional electoral system, where a large fraction of people get to feel appropriately represented.
With such a bipartisan division in politics, it doesn't matter whether the issues were "discussed": there won't be compromise across the centre line.
> Perfect example is reddit banned "the donald" sub and they went on to create thedonald.win.
Which turned into a even bigger echochamber than previosuly. At least, while they were on reddit, on the frontpage you were exposed to posts from both sides.
Now each side just browse its own version of the online ghetto, without being exposed to posts from the other side calling out the conspiracy theories, the partially reported news, the plain bullshit.
Can you provide evidence supporting massive de-platforming. As far as I know a few far right people who blatantly abused the TOS were banned. Most of these guys can freely post on Twitter and Facebook.
If it makes you feel any better the same thing it's happening across the Atlantic, with the Yellow Vests movement which is being made fun of in France, the Brexiters which are derided in UK and people in my country (Romania) laughing at the people who didn't want to wear masks at some point because "their mouths smell" (yeah, not anyone can afford dental work).
I think the problem is more subtle than that. There is a general evaporation of trust levels in societies across the world, not just the U.S. The world is becoming a very low-trust place.
Deplatforming and censorship are only some factors in this process, but there are others. Remember Trump's original claim to "drain the swamp"? In the age of the Internet, anyone who pays attention to politics is overwhelmed by examples of bad behavior from the top guys and gals. People, being partisan creatures, will mostly concentrate on the top guys and gals from the other side, but contemporary democratic world is transparent enough not to let you doubt that the basic institutions are rotten to the core. Once upon a time, random people could have (positive) illusions about what takes place in the palaces of power in Brussel, London, Paris or Washington. Now they know it down to the last dirty detail and I believe that some of them just cannot cope.
At the same time, China notices this and does its utmost to suppress any disagreeing voices within, much more so than 15 years ago. The end result should probably be a curated, polished image of the country and its system with no visible flaws. I doubt that they can sell this to the outside observers, but they may get their own population to believe that without reservations: "we are the champions".
What peaceful discourse? In no universe are people coming together and breaking bread with racists and confederate sympathizers. You feel unheard because your ideas are toxic and unintegratable. Let it be split down the middle, because coming together is not happening.
hey, thanks for this comment. i'm inclined to disagree, but i'm genuinely curious about your point of view.
one question i have is -- are there any topics you believe deserve to be censored by social media? or maybe i should say any "political" topics? like, i guess you'd probably be okay with some kinds of sex work being censored, but i maybe sex work is also a form of politics...
anyway, i guess i'm curious if you're a free-speech absolutist, or, if otherwise, how would you do draw a line to avoid "mass" deplatforming and have it be targeted deplatforming.
That was already dead, I mean the_donald spamming the front page to perfectly align "GOD EMPEROR" or whatever before reddit had to change their front page algorithm was not discourse.
And this is now, after people are distracted by social media. American Political discourse died soon after Fox news came on the stage. People seem to have forgotten how that era was because this era is simply worse.
Fox has been around for quite a while, and it was never “QAnon level crazy”. Fox was here since the Bush era, and I regularly had political debates and discussions with people I disagreed with back then. Sure, I could have never turned a Republican against the war, but I certainly was able to find common ground on PATRIOT/etc. Not anymore.
As I said its gotten worse, the trend is undeniable.
I mean take a look at some of the greatest hits - it was the FOX news cycle that gave credence to creationism and the debate whether Evolution existed worked. Remember "teach the debate"?
This was a level of FUD that completely outperformed previous work which simply distracted or confused over more recent science like climate change.
Here an entirely established piece of science which is used everyday, even now in vaccines - was made invalid.
The divorce from reality was achieved by lots of hard work by ad and content people, along with the news networks.
They can, but let's not pretend that Parler won't be targeted for destruction somehow if it gets a critical mass of users. We've seen this strategy employed before on right-wing platforms that catch too much negative media attention. Their infrastructure platforms will be targeted, their distribution channels will be targeted, their payment systems will be targeted, their code licenses will be targeted, the media will try to dig up whatever negative stories about the firm or its owners that they can, etc. Eventually some platform will be able to resist this but it's an ugly process.
This is, frankly, irresponsible. The events of today were precipitated by hatred, propaganda, a rejection of personal responsibility, and an embracing of hypocrisy, committed mostly by Trump's supporters over a long time. It's the expected behavior of the minority of people with the least intelligence and integrity when tribalism escalates.
And yet still, even if none of that were the case, it's deeply immoral to paint violence as a somehow justifiable reaction to being shouted off Twitter for being a "racial realist", and other hills Trump supporters insist on dying on.
I don't see any "mass deplatforming and censorship". Trump and his supporters have had massive airtime and been given ample opportunity to say their peace on mainstream media in the last few years.
Some people will criticize and ridicule that, yes. That's part of free speech. And if everyone is ridiculing you, then perhaps there might be the possibility you're saying ridiculous things?
Deplatformed conservatives eh? This has got to be one of the oldest conservative tropes.
FoxNews screams conservatives have no voice, while patting themselves on the back for being the most watched cable channel. [1] Rush Limbaugh is the most listened to Radio show in the United States. [2]
Conservatives scream they have no platform on Facebook, yet the top 10 shared links of Facebook are almost exclusively conservative. [3], and you can observe this trend holding over time.
Conservatives have plenty of other platforms to go to. No one is deplatforming conservatives on 4chan, or Parler, or hell, even Reddit.
The 'deplatformed' narrative is a manufactured, and used to drive a persecution complex. Its not real, and used to rile the base.
Regarding reddit, that is plainly not true. If you were conservative minded, it would take all of 10 seconds to realise that the hive mind is antagonist to your beliefs.
I'm not from the US, and from an outsiders perspective, it is clear as day that reddit is liberal and votes democrat, and they think you are an idiot if you do otherwise.
You can go to /r/conservative right now, and write any crap you want. You're conflating the notion of deplatforming with the notion of a place having a certain political leaning.
I can go comment liberal ideas on Breitbart and immediately be shouted down as a commie CCP bootlicker and be blocked. I guess by your logic that means liberals are getting deplatformed too!
> You can go to /r/conservative right now, and write any crap you want.
You chose the worst example. /r/conservative has been getting brigaded since before this election. One of the reasons for which /r/thedonald was quarantined in 2019.
I know because everytime a big news from US get published in my country national papers, i used to open several subreddits in order to hear both sides of the story.
> I can go comment liberal ideas on Breitbart and immediately be shouted down as a commie CCP bootlicker and be blocked.
The same happens on the other virtual side of aisle. And it's not something unique to the US. I'm not American, but in my country the political discourse has been polarized the same way, with one side accused of been Putin's puppet, and those voting for them being accused of being fascists, and the other side now getting accused of being on China's payroll and getting called comunists.
The side controlling the biggest subreddit in my country, is the same that believes in the "russian puppets" story.
If you post from your personal account about some scandal that is on the national newspapers regarding the side they believe in, people start scraping your profile searching for information in order to dox you, and start sending you private messages insulting you.
If you post by using a throwaway because you don't want to risk receiving death threats just for having a different opinion, they start with the usual "this account is new, it's a russian propaganda troll".
The moderators delete threads and comments about arguments that damage their side, and if you politely ask for an explanation for the removal they insult you, ban you and mute you.
They got to the point that when some polital topics became damaging to their side because of huge mistakes that were made, they banned those topics with the excuse that "they bring brigaders and propaganda accounts".
This is not something that's only happening in right leaning echochambers.
And I don't think that this is something that helps keep an healty political discussion.
I'm liberal, and I frequently visit forums that happen to be majority conservative (not to talk politics). The prevailing voices there are antagonistic to my beliefs, to put it mildly. They say out loud way, way worse things about me than simply implying that I am an "idiot". And yet I don't lament that their platform is politically biased and run away and call myself deplatformed. They are calling normal reactions to the things they say a persecution. It's a victim complex, and a deeply hypocritical one rooted in purest hatred for liberals.
It goes hand-in-glove with the conflicting ideas that "the other side is so stupid and incompetent" while at the same time "the other side is so sly and crafty with their diabolical plans." I'm pretty sure some folks in 1930s Germany used similar tactics.
We need to be very clear here, we're explicitly talking about LESS THAN HALF of the electorate. Donald Trump did not win the popular vote in either presidential election he participated in.
An alternative perspective is these protests aren't actually all that unprecedented. Protesting against a new president is fairly routine (they did that for Trump) and violence is not so unexpected in economically tough years (like 2020).
The sensible response to not being heard is to establish a voice, not to riot. So riots are probably not a sign of that.
Deplatforming is a persistent right wing fantasy. If you don't openly misinform regarding public safety or very explicitly promote hate you can largely get away with saying almost anything else on Twitter, etc. When Trump blatantly spreads dangerous misinformation about Covid, for example, there is a lot of whining about deplatforming. Don't be fooled.
Furthermore, claiming deplatforming (a delusion) is the cause of political violence is nothing more than a grotesque distortion and justification.
So Trump got kicked off twitter, and people can get kicked off various platforms for saying extreme things, but deplatforming does not exist because you agree with the reasons why those people got kicked off, and therefore other people are delusional and living in fantasies, and you have an opinion on if this concept which does not exist causes violence.
First definition I found
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deplatform
(transitive, formal) deplatform 1: To prevent someone from utilizing a platform to express their opinion.
You think it's worse to interpret a word literally if that literal definition is broad, than it is to interpret a word in a way that makes the other person seem delusional and nonsensical? In the context of a specific conversation, its more reasonable to interpret somebodies words in a way that makes their words make sense, than in a way that makes them sound delusional.
> Half of the American electorate currently feels profoundly unheard
Well they're wrong to think that and they should be discouraged from nursing that false belief. Conservatives have controlled the entire government for the last four years, including a conservative supermajority in the SCOTUS that will last for decades. In reality, those Americans are the most heard if by "heard" we mean having their political will effected by means of their government and not "permitted to shitpost on twitter".
Conservatives controlled America for all but 2 years in this century, only in 2008-2010 both executive and legislative branches were under Democrats. Republicans heavily gerrymandered country in their favor in 2010 and given that 2020 census is practically a failure, that advantage is going to stay. Conservatives get to control the SCOTUS for decades. Voters from the red states enjoy unfair influence their vote gives them via Senate.
If after all this the electorate feels profoundly unheard maybe they should look at who they vote for.
I don't think there's much validity to this conservative persecution complex when you subject it to analysis. There's a difference between what feels to be the case and what is.
Social media are about emotional impulses and endorphin triggers, not rationality or reality. Conflating the two is undermining societies across the world.
The American right isn't being censored in general. It's a vehicle for disinformation, to a somewhat greater degree than the American left. It's mainly that disinformation that's being censored on social media. In other media: those are as segregated between the two parties as they have been for decades.
As far as de-platforming, review bombing and the like: it's not the right being excluded, it's anyone who doesn't conform to the fringe left's concepts of orthodoxy and political correctness. You know, the "woke" crowd.
What happened at the Capitol was not the result of mass de-platforming and censorship. It was the result of ideological self-isolation, ignorance of historical context (among other things) and blindly parroting partisan talking points without exercising critical thought. This has been happening since Vietnam, before social media or even the Internet were invented. It culminated in the election of Trump, the emergence of Proud Boys, BLM and Antifa, the state of particularly the GOP and yesterday's events.
For all the so-called differences between the two sides in American politics, they share a surprising amount of traits: ideological bubbles, authoritarian leanings, tribal sentiments, demonising the other side, distrust in corporate media and feeling oppressed/disenfranchised. There's at least a hint to the shared American subconscious there.
Yeah, I mostly agree. I'm not sure if the deplatforming push is good or not but I see moves like this only accelerating it, which is going to lead to a deepening "red internet / blue internet" schism that's probably not good for either side. It's obvious that the left feels that they can keep shutting down right-wing media by various sorts of economic pressure and legislation, but I think we're seeing this strategy start to hit sharply diminishing returns but at this point the echo chambers have been so strongly reinforced that it's hard to imagine any other strategy getting support.
Its not like there was enlightened discourse going on in the first place.
When The_donald was busy tea bagging the front page to get the submissions titles just right and spelling out something like "own the libs", no great bi-partisan agreement was being reached.
I think it just became clear to the democrat and "left" that the right had stopped caring for years.
This idea that there was a conversation is simply revisionist, and blaming the left is to blame the laggard for imitating the front runner.
>no great bi-partisan agreement was being reached.
No, but it's not like things couldn't be worse, and I don't think that the sort of eliminationist tactics that are being embraced are going to make things better. The left will manage to deplatform the right off of a bunch of major sites but they'll just reconvene elsewhere, out of reach. Will this be good or bad for discourse?
If this is the part of the journey that you are waking up during, then unfortunately there’s only bad news. What you see coming up was already baked in.
I dare say, so are the natural counter reactions to it.
If it’s unclear, remember the quaint days of the Fox News effect. America was pulling away for a long time, and the right was the first one to realize the political advantage of it.
Frankly I doubt America, especially the American right, can currently sit down and figure out how it got here.
This isn’t an unfair criticism mind you, you can simply see how the right has gone from the river boat (?) days to the tea party to the Trump days of today, to track how hyper partisan it’s become internally.
The media structures at play, such as Fox News, are determined to sell a partisan story.
The Republican Party is so unable to work with the dems that they even rejected “Obama care” - which was built around a Republican program -Romneycare.
This is simply one example, to highlight that what you are seeing is momentum at play.
The machines that spin it up - namely the political:media structures, are fully active.
Plus it’s been frightfully effective for the right.
When Obama came to power, the right had suffered a massive demoralizing loss. They had nothing and were demoralized.
Instead they got together and found strength in sheer force of will and used the term “one term president” to invigorate themselves and fight Obama at every turn.
This dogged will to fight at all costs is impressive, and it resulted in styling Obama, and even gave them Trump.
The Trump years have been amazing for the Republicans and so many core Republican goals have been fulfilled, especially the Supreme Court judges.
The republicans approach simply works. Why wouldn’t the left pick up that lesson?
You’ll even see that the rise of the left in the democrats is a mirror of the same process on the right.
TLDR: sorry man, bipartisanship is long dead in your country.
What should worry you even more - these processes aren’t unique to America. Fully expect to see this same break down around the world.
How do you feel about subreddits like r/MurderedByAOC, r/AOC, r/LeopardsAteMyFace, r/ToiletPaperUSA, and others doing the exact same thing to the front page?
Honestly, I don't see the difference. If you're talking about general low quality posts, look no further than r/PoliticalHumor. And, even though the algorithm has changed, The Donald was ONE pro-trump subreddit and they got banned. They are gone now, mission accomplished.
Now you have about a dozen progressive subreddits hitting the front page on a daily basis with nothing more than screenshots of tweets. How is that any better?
> You can't make people's beliefs go away by silencing them.
Actually you can, but that's not what I want to get at right now.
The problem is that these people there went to the Capitol for the sake of violence and not for the sake of being heard. What I am going to say is not true about conservatives overall, but definitely true for every single MAGA cultist out there.
They generally have completely baseless opinions and are not ready to discuss anything, have an argument, learn or compromise. This is what democracy is based on: compromise. Therefore, they are fundamentally undemocratic and if you're being honest they are fascists.
So fuck their ability to spout their violent garbage online. These are dehumanizing assholes incapable of discussing with liberals and finding compromise. They just want a dictatorship suppressing and killing liberals, if possible.
Society would be better off if trump were treated like the extreme but fringe and discountable voice he is. The US has had a president elect since November, but most of the headlines are still circling trump. Most lame ducks quickly get put into the second or third tier of coverage after the election results. After inauguration, the media had better never mention trump outside of the “special interest” section of their coverage.
Extreme and unaccountable sure, but fringe and discountable... about 90 million followers on twitter alone aren't exactly that. I do agree that the media needs to stop feeding the troll, however.
Hear me out on this because the first sentence sounds crazy but I’m not condoning what these people did.
What came to mind when I read this news about Capitol Hill was the famous MLK quote “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Along with the thought that these a mostly middle class white people no doubt. Which are overall a privileged group. So I got to thinking about what it means to be heard in today’s world. I think that for a lot of conservatives in a digital world it can feel like their voice or the voice of people with their beliefs aren’t heard. Certainly you can find little echo chambers of conservatism, but when you go to the big news sites, the front page of Reddit, or Twitter it sure looks like everyone leans left. Couple this with the leader of your movement getting little notes on all his tweets to at what he says isn’t true or getting removed. I can see how it feels like your worldview is getting silenced, hence a riot. So I wonder if these movements by Twitter are ultimately counter productive.
Just a half baked idea, but some food for thought.
Censoring speech is just going to alienate a huge section of the country rather than provide transparency and a common dialogue
We aren't - well, I used to say we weren't - like Communist China, because our ideas could compete in a marketplace of ideas and win out on their merits. Sadly, strong political rhetoric is causing our own media companies to self-censor and in non-transparent ways.
They certainly feel like a disparaged minority that is perpetually disparaged and attacked.
The only problem is that in general most people... aren't attacking them. This persecution complex is almost completely manufactured.
Best example? The War on Christmas. Almost completely fabricated on the evidence. But people feel like they are being pushed to the margins, and there are several leaders fanning these feelings.
And that's not to say there aren't real issues. The middle class is shrinking! Whites are not the majority, just a plurality. The manufacturing world is gutted. The opioid crisis has reversed the upward trend of life expectancy!
But then what do they blame? Feminists. Liberals. Immigrants. Not the actual problems. And being marginalized has more to do with as a bloc them removing themselves from a shared worldview and facts and increasingly becoming more and more unhinged by conspiracy theory thinking.
I think our whole culture has developed a massive victim complex in recent years. It seems like every group is trying to point to how they are oppressed (some more rightfully than others) and almost glorifying it in this weird way I can’t quite put a finger on.
Interestingly, Christianity started out this way too. I was thinking the other day, perhaps accepting the role of a victim allows one to submit to the collective thus allowing a victim society to win against an individualist society.
I also note that military is an interesting mixture of the individualist bravery and the honor of service (non-victimized way of relinquishing control).
Twitter and Facebook are executing a Man-in-the-Middle attack between the government and the citizens and people are cheering them on. This is ridiculous.
The government should use their own website + RSS to communicate with its citizens, not some private social media. It should promote open standards (activepub,RSS...) not a private corporation.
The government needs to be able to communicate with people where they are. 99% of the population has no idea what RSS or activitypub are or how to use them. People have a right to hear, without a filter exactly what their elected officials are saying. It is necessary for a functioning democracy. If we are only allowed to hear things that Twitter and Facebook deem acceptable, then Facebook and Twitter are effectively governing the country, not the people.
The idea that Twitter or Facebook are forced to be the propoagators of anyone's speech is false. Instead, all users are subject to the same EULA and TOS, and likewise, are judged in terms of the content they post, not their political leanings. If you owned a website that allowed public postings, would you ever consider yourself obligated to protect a member of the government's speech in a way you do not for a normal user?
Also, you can hardly call it a MITM attack when they are specifically announcing their policy. Your usage of that term implies an underhanded policy designed to hide their intentions and actions. This is clearly not the case.
Do you know what happens if you let your neighbour cross through your property for 30 years to get access to the back of their property?
Claiming that all users are subject to the same rules might have had some merit if he were suspended years ago.
I don't know if I'd really go so far as to say that trump has an easement at this point, but it's not an entirely absurd position.
Moreover, if you actually look at the content they removed I don't think it's by any means an obvious violation of their TOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668883 -- it's certainly less so than plenty of content which they leave up on the site.
Excuse me if I think it's a little more important that the public is informed about what elected officials are saying than it is to respect Twitter and Facebook's EULA and TOS where they say they can sell my firstborn to the highest bidder if it helps meet their quarterly numbers.
If the President of the United States is saying something, it is my right and duty to hear exactly what that is, verbatim, so I can appropriately participate in our democracy. It is not at all acceptable for Twitter, Facebook, or any other third party to intercede and decide for me that what they said was good or bad. That is my decision to make. The fact that so many people here are willing and eager to cede that authority to faceless, unaccountable corporations is frankly appalling.
>If you owned a website that allowed public postings, would you ever consider yourself obligated to protect a member of the government's speech in a way you do not for a normal user?
That's an excellent point. This freedom of speech should indeed extend to everyone, not just government officials.
>If the President of the United States is saying something, it is my right and duty to hear exactly what that is, verbatim, so I can appropriately participate in our democracy.
Sure, you do have that right, it is only that it is not the responsibility of Twitter or Facebook to be the avenue through which the President communicates.
Twitter and Facebook have, in my opinion, already bent over backwards trying to let the President say what he wished. The events yesterday basically forced them to make a policy decision: Protect the free speech of a person dangerous to our democracy, who will no longer be in power in a few weeks, or simply wash their hands of him? I am sure it is not too difficult to make a choice given the options.
And in addition to all of this, why in God's name, if I did support your belief in a private corporation's obligaiton to run a private enterprise as a public institution, would I try to protect the President when he has done everything he can to cause __the exact__ incidents that Twitter and Facebook are explicitly denouncing his statements for inciting & supporting?
Today they're silencing the President in the name of preventing violence (highly questionable whether this achieves that goal with respect to a mob of people who believe there is a conspiracy among the media to silence them). Tomorrow maybe a Senator who calls for an antitrust investigation into Twitter or who questions labor practices at Amazon finds themselves mysteriously silenced for "hate speech". When it happens, just remember it was what you wanted.
A Trump supported trying to talk to me about the importance of precedent? That'll be the day, that'll be the day. You don't get to support a person who has flouted every precedent they could find in their four years in office and then turn around and act as if you care, or even know the definition of, the word precdent.
Yeah, there is absolutely no possible way for a president with a press secretary and press corps consisting of dozens of news outlets to communicate with the American people if Twitter doesn't allow it. FFS.
They suspended Trump's personal account. Not the official president account. They didn't stop him from going on live tv or radio or sending out press releases or going on twitch or going on facebook or any of tons of other media outlets.
Half of Brazil is excited and the other half is scared. Bolsonaro is very very similar to Trump and has made many comments about the security of elections. There is a probability the same will happen here in 2022.
I must apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings whether or not they had something more appropriate to contribute.
I should have put a question mark at the end of my message.
Never was good at grammar to begin with.
I don't know if it's the Democrats or Republicans who are less trustworthy from one day to the next.
Wouldn't want to buy a used car from any one of 'em. Even worse a new car.
Anyway, if Hillary Clinton did something treasonous enough to get locked up it would have happened.
For how long who knows, but what would be equal protection under the law for US citizens to be protected from those who would threaten the sanctity of the US Democracy, especially from a position of power when that position is intended to preseve the work of all those who have come before and served without any doubt of their good intentions for all constituents?
I'm curious if this will be possible 10 years from now. A single corporation to be able to censor a president. No matter who that president is or what is she/he saying. What if that corporation is led by someone else with totally different political views or motivation?
On one platform. He still can pull up a press conference whenever he wants just like every other president has done when they need to communicate with the public
And that's precisely the danger of social media. If he must reach his following through a (relatively) neutral third party (the main-stream media) that third party can choose whether or not to pass that information on.
If he always and at all times has unfettered access to a rabid following, there is no moderation, no mediation, and we get our current situation.
> He still can pull up a press conference whenever he wants just like every other president has done when they need to communicate with the public
The media has regularly ignored presidential press conferences they didn't care about for decades now. Bush, Obama, and Trump all had many press conferences that received minimal coverage. In that light, it's no surprise that a President would seek our a more direct line of communication.
> single corporation to be able to censor a president
People on a medium tend to overstate that media’s influence. Newspapers routinely refuse to print politicians’ op eds. Twitter is more pervasive, but it’s far from universal. As long as it’s not fiddled with around elections, de-platforming is fine.
The President does have certain abilities to commandeer media time, but that would require making an official address.
You make it sound like Twitter is the be all and end all of public discourse. Twitter isn't even in the top five. He could ramble on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit or Snapchat before we even get down to Twitter.
God damn, I'd have this discussion any other day but not today.
The President is inciting violence by spreading dangerous misinformation and not condemning domestic terrorists.
Our sacred democratic institutions and world standing have taken a big hit. And, even worse - American lives were lost today due to this rhetoric.
We can't continue acting like this is a matter of hurr durr censorship anymore. It's time to move past idealism and into reality: people are in danger. Words have consequences.
We saw today what happens when people with immense power spout extremist ideology for years without consequence.
Let today's action by Twitter be part of the consequence. It's not censorship: it's consequence. Trump will not be arrested or chased for his rhetoric. He simply won't be able to spout it to the masses on a privately owned platform.
A life was lost today. There should be some consequence.
It is curious to me that the reaction to people rioting in a place of institutional, systemic power is much more negative than when people were rioting and damaging small businesses, homes, and killing regular people. That is, people seem to be reacting much more strongly to people rioting in a way that damages institutional power than when they were rioting in a way that damaged the powerless.
Trump has been a gift for Twitter as far as platform usage goes. In a sense, banning him is biting that hand that feeds it. They can say that they're really upset with Trump, but as a for-profit company, the sad reality is that they need people like him.
I'm not sure how I feel about actually deleting tweets. They were said, I didn't see them prior to deletion, and now as a disinterested party I don't have the opportunity to see them and perhaps view Trump in a worse light on account of the things he said that were so appalling they had to be deleted.
I say 'not sure' because in the case of personal attacks, for example, obviously there's an extra dimension that it's not very nice for the attacked to see it/know that it's there.
But I don't really like a nanny ~state~ private company telling me I can't have a chuckle at some nonsense that I know isn't going to incite me to do anything, or whatever.
It is Twitter's Twitter to do with what it pleases though.
Crazy how the police took such a hands-off approach to keeping the riot out of the capitol. I saw a video of police opening up the barricade line so they could come past it. Such a stark contrast to police action during the BLM protests.
I wonder what the chain of command was who told these cops to essentially do nothing today. Who does the buck stop with?
This is being discussed extensively at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661474 and there are many comments along the same lines, though you may have to click More (at the bottom) once or twice to get to them.
All the comments along these lines seem to be factually untrue, considering that the police killed a protestor at this protest. That alone makes this one of the most aggressive police responses to a protest in the past year, even ignoring the thousands of national guard and police in riot gear who responded with pepper spray, tear gas, and guns.
You've unfortunately broken the site guidelines repeatedly lately. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN in the intended spirit? If we can't rely on established users like you to do that, this place is really doomed.
The juxtaposition of this vs the indiscriminate violence police used in the summer against protestors on the streets is pretty jarring.
The fact that a large mob of people like this - many of them armed, and some of them planting explosives - breaking into the Capitol, taking things and causing a bunch of damage, results in only a small handful of arrests is pretty crazy, too.
I agree that they can deescalate when they want to. However, the way I understand the defund the police idea was to defund and eventually get their needed funds back with lots of reform. The prospect of funds does change things quite a bit. Always! At this point they're overfunded so no carrot to get them to move forward.
Most "defund the police" opponents I personally know are furious that protesters were ever allowed to enter the building and are demanding to see everyone who did arrested.
It's hard to even get that far at this point. They (and I - I don't want to pretend to be a neutral party here) are still reeling from the idea that you can forcibly enter the US Capitol without being shot dead on the spot. Basically everything we thought we knew about the typical processes of policing is, apparently, wrong.
That's fair. I won't rub salt in the wound; seeing this all unfold on video is way more chilling than I'd anticipated. All I'll ask is that once you feel up to it, you have a candid discussion with someone on the other side of the issue about why they feel such drastic action is necessary.
Are we living in parallel universes? This was 1 day of protests and it resulted in the police or another authority killing 1 protestor. That is an objectively more violent record from the authorities than the average BLM protest. I see people non-ironically saying if BLM conducted this protest the police would have shot them.
It's only crazy if you think the rule of law is applied consistently, fairly, and apolitically.
If you've followed the history of protest in this country, you'll find it difficult to believe any of these things. From suffragist, to labour, to the civil rights movement, unarmed left-wing protests are routinely brutalized by police. Armed right-wing protests are not.
Who would have thought that people with guns are less likely to be brutalized by the gov or literally anyone. Almost sounds like a pro-gun argument to me but I'm sure it wasn't mean to be one. The victims must be victims because the evils are evil right. That their own actions or inactions makes them the victim just doesn't fit the victim mentality of some. Its just one of many things that shows how they are so out of touch with reality. Did no one ever told these leftist that life isn't fair, that people dont play by the rules, that having right doesn't mean you also get it? We should strive for the perfect world but it will never exist and only a fool would walk the earth as if it where paradise already.
When someone is brutalized by another human because they don't have a gun, of course that's because people are being evil! How dare you say they made themselves a victim?
Not what I said.
There is a right to bear arms in the US. Its specifically there to prevent the gov form getting to powerful and abuse its power. The people who decide on their own free will that guns should be removed form the people put themself and others in the victim position. If you get brutalized by anyone and you voluntary dont want to defend yourself that Is victim mentality. If you CANT defense yourself (for whatever reason) that's a different situation.
No, thats not what I said. Your misinterpretation starts at the very first sentence.
I said "people with guns are less likely to be brutalized by the gov or literally anyone."
>And trying to do self defense with a gun is a terrible idea in most circumstances.
statistics say otherwise also statistics cant even capture the self defenses that weren't needed because someone had a gun and could have used it if needed.
>(Though trying to fight government abuse with a gun is also a terrible idea.)
trying to fighting against anyone isn't self defense. no where did I say anything the like you just made that up.
>Deciding not to carry around a gun is very different from deciding not to defend yourself. It's not victim mentality.
You are seem unable to completely read and understand my post. You cant just pick one part and ignore the rest. I clear said that if you cant defend yourself its not the same as if you voluntary dont want to. There are many valid reasons why you would not carry a gun and so if you dont have one you obliviously cant us it. Not the same as if you want to have guns removed from anyone so people no longer have a choice.
> No, thats not what I said. Your misinterpretation starts at the very first sentence. I said "people with guns are less likely to be brutalized by the gov or literally anyone."
I'm not sure what the 'no' refers to?
Your original post said "the gov or literally anyone". Your second post only talked about the gov part, so I reminded you about the "literally anyone" part. Where's the misinterpretation?
> trying to fighting against anyone isn't self defense. no where did I say anything the like you just made that up.
Let me rephrase. Self defense against the government with a gun is a terrible idea.
> You are seem unable to completely read and understand my post. You cant just pick one part and ignore the rest. I clear said that if you cant defend yourself its not the same as if you voluntary dont want to.
You did say that. You also equated choosing not to carry a gun with choosing not to defend yourself, with the phrases "Who would have thought that people with guns are less likely to be brutalized by the gov or literally anyone." and "their own actions or inactions makes them the victim"
Are you telling me you didn't mean to equate those? If so then your original post was written misleadingly, and I don't even know who you're even accusing of victim mentality anymore.
If you did mean to equate those, then I still think your opinion is hot garbage.
Even without comparing to BLM, the actions of the people that raided the Capitol should be condemned on their own. There is no need to bring in BLM as a crutch to make the case. It just makes it less weaker than it is.
This is an assault on democracy. We don't need to explicitly cite double standards to make our case. Stop comparing what's going on on the Capitol with BLM protests.
Why? The contrast is important and highlights how difficult it is to peacefully assemble for a noble cause if armed representatives of the state are determined to abuse and provoke a response out of you. It underscores the hypocrisy of people who said that they would support BLM in abstract if not for “all the violence.”
Turns out the violence had nothing to do with it, which was obvious all along of course. But it’s good to know for sure.
Because, if we need to make the case for opposing treason/insurrection by using black lives matter protests for social justice as a crutch - completely orthogonal reasons for protests, boy... we look weak.
The comparison to Black Lives Matter rioting is important. I find it very bizarre that the media correctly calls these idiots rioters, but they call the Black Lives Matter idiots doing the same sort of thing protestors.
I saw both words used in the BLM riots and both words used today. "The Media" is not a monolith. Different organizations spin the story different ways.
Reminder: BLM protests had wide-scale looting. Looters breaking into luxury stores and hauling off with anything not bolted down. Not the same scope. Not the same standard.
Reminder - in Seattle, looting and property damage only started hours after the police started throwing tear gas and firing less-lethal bullets into protestors, and the entire downtown area turned into chaos.
In Bellevue, the police did neither, and instead, talked with the protesters, and there was no looting anywhere near the protest areas.
If you actually cared about minimizing looting, you should probably not attack peaceful protestors on public streets. The chaos that starts is what gives looters cover to operate.
Yet another reminder: looting perhaps already started elsewhere in other parts of the country. Also the Rodney king riots had a precedent of looting. Learning from past lessons would be wise.
Also as you imply, why would being treated poorly by a public servant (the police) justify the looting of an unrelated private party? It doesn’t. One is not a justified cause for the other.
There were two deaths, one of which was a black man being murdered by Proud Boys, and the other does not have evidence suggesting it was related to the Seattle AZ (other than they were near the perimeter).
Those people are being let past a barrier to where a lot of other people already are. So it doesn't look like they are getting let in to a restricted area.
Maybe we're just seeing the police manage crowd flow.
Without some context I don't see that this shows anything bad happening here.
It's not even clear the barricades, which didn't even meet in middle, were even moved by the police. The only police I can clearly make out are in the center and when the camera zooms in I can't see who moved the barricades away.
It's a bit amazing this video is being peddled around HN as evidence of anything; there is so little context.
So we should delete it just in case ryt?
Or at least put a message under it that makes sure people use their brain even less because they are told that the video shows something but has no context and thus should only be used for entertaining purpose.
It’s not clear to me that the direction the protesters walk is towards the capitol. They could just as easily be letting people who didn’t want to be associated with the rioting leave the protest.
I don't have a horse in this and I don't know the area to maybe spot something about it that makes it look worse, but isn't that/couldn't it just be 'kettling'?
Kettling involves directing protestors to an area to be arrested or otherwise forced to leave -- not to allow them easier access to join the rest of the rioters at the Capitol.
But does the video show them having 'access to join the rest of the rioters at the Capitol', or does it just show them being allowed to move from one area to another?
(Not knowing the area/layout/etc. as I said) I just see the latter, with it implied they're about to rush up the steps, but where they go (there or otherwise) unshown.
Well... this mob surely had protest as a reason (or at least a declared reason) to assemble and storm the building, so - yes, why not? There are other words that are applicable, but "protestor" is a semantically valid option.
Unless by the "right word" you meant "how they should be called". But then it becomes a highly subjective question.
Stop them from getting in. Not nicely escort them out, but arrest them? (although I assume the FBI et al are archiving posted pictures and videos as we speak). It's not like they don't know how to do that, see any other protest at the capitol.
Yes, seems to be very hard to grasp for some people that they would fight and use whatever means necessary to stop people who would literally stab, shoot or set them on fire if they turn their back also they demand them to kneel in front of them and what not. Some of them where directly coming for the cops directly attacking them or setting buildings on fire where they where inside. While the people who stormed the building today had zero interest in the cops. The protest was against the other people in the building not the cops. Even after the woman got shot there was no sign of revenge against cops. There is even evidence that cops where immediately given access to the victim to save her (which apparently wasn't possible anymore).
Like when they took over several square blocks of Seattle for a month and declared independence and weren't stopped by the cops until their private police force killed too many black teenagers?
1. The Seattle protests did not storm any buildings, force people out of their workplaces, or planted any bombs.
2. The SPD, for a reason they still can't explain, and against the orders of both Mayor Durkan, and Police Chief Best, chose to leave the East Precinct, and then, in a petty manner, stopped responding to calls in the entire Capitol Hill area.
3. The CHAZ occupied a public park, and the streets of the surrounding block. It did not stop the operation of businesses, legislatures, or government. It did not prevent the police from accessing the area.
What we're seeing here, is a failed coup - an attempt to prevent the peaceful, democratic transfer of power by force, at the behest of a politician. I can't believe that you can't tell the difference between a coup, and a protest. One is treason and insurrection, which carries the death penalty, while the other is a constitutionally protected right.
Police have said a lot of things in Seattle that turned out to be complete falsehoods. Nearly every night of the protest, they'd make false statements that were trivially disproved by video evidence.
I'll believe it when its a citation from an impartial third party - a paramedic, a bystander, etc.
The fact is, the police retained access to both the East Precinct, and to CHAZ, through the latter's existence. They would show up in small groups of two or three, and were allowed in.
Do you realize how biased you come across? You can pick whatever "evidence" or "source of evidence" you want but you'd still need to apply that standard to "both sides".
Literally any organization has a history of lying. Completely pointless statement. You have to applies the same standards to both sides. If you want them impossible high then go for it.
If you only believe what you have seen with your own eyes then fine. But you cant make any statements about anything you have not seen then.
I do give a small amount of consideration to the sacredness of the capitol, and the additional damage that images of blood spilled on the steps of our capitol would do.
Well that doesn't make sense. The sacredness of the capitol should demand that it be protected. Images of law enforcement preventing a mob from disrupting the act of signing off on the transfer of power would be a strong statement that needs to be made, I think.
The videos that I saw were far from being like that... they were using tear gas and blocking them but it is plausible that they got in because they let them.
This distinction doesn't exist under the actually existing version of §230.
I think it's shocking how Twitter has completely changed course from its "free speech wing of the free speech party" positioning, and I understand why people find it frustrating that you don't have to "choose between being a platform and a publisher". But you don't; that's not the law and it hasn't been the law for over a quarter-century. And that rule has mostly been a very good thing for online speech.
No, Twitter is within its right to remove stuff that goes against its policy. e.g. no one in their right mind would argue to keep a tweet up if it was a picture of child pornography.
Sure, but the point is that Twitter would be justified in proactively removing said content before a legal order to that effect got served.
More broadly, Twitter is not obligated to keep tweets up from anyone to anyone. It would be rather silly if, for example, all tweets from north america got deleted and people got up in arms accusing it of "censorship" (in a hypothetical scenario where unbeknownst to them, there was a catastrophic infrastructure failure).
The semantic arguments are pointless. The question is, do you want a private corporation to dictate whether or not the government of the United States is able to communicate to the citizens? If you do, you are effectively placing the leadership of the country at Twitter's discretion. Do you want to have a democracy where all voices can be heard, or do you want a small cadre of unelected corporate bureaucrats to decide what is allowed and not allowed?
We have an established democratic process to censure (not censor) and if necessary, remove from office elected officials. That is the appropriate venue and the appropriate authority to deal with this, not Twitter.
> The question is, do you want a private corporation to dictate whether or not the government of the United States is able to communicate to the citizens?
Generally, yes, I want private entities to decide whether or not to relay government messages. (The government should have its own facilities for basic necessary operational communication via the post, common carrier phone systems, etc., of course.)
The alternative is to surrender freedom of speech in favor of government direction of media.
There’s a very narrow space of cases where, with appropriate procedural safeguards, which start with legislation determining the need and setting the conditions of use, the government ought to be able to direct messages over private infrastructure that isn’t common-carrier; that role is pretty much covered by the Emergency Alert System [0] in the US.
> The alternative is to surrender freedom of speech in favor of government direction of media.
Delivering government messages does not preclude you from also delivering contradictory messages from others. Freedom of speech would involve delivering all messages, not just the ones you like. Requirement to deliver messages != direction of the media.
> Freedom of speech would involve delivering all messages, not just the ones you like.
No, my freedom of speech and the press means I don’t relay speech or use my press to reproduce messages I don’t think deserve to be relayed.
That’s pretty well established to be the meaning of that freedom.
> Requirement to deliver messages != direction of the media.
Yes, the state mandating that I use my resources (such as a printing press, or its digital analog) to reproduce and disseminate messages I disagree with relaying is direction of the media and (outside the usual strict scrutiny terms for restrictions on essential liberty) a violation of my First Amendment rights.
Twitter is a conduit, not a publisher. The speech on Twitter is the speech of the users, not the speech of Twitter itself. This is no different from AT&T deciding they they will only put through phone calls from Republican users, because why should they be forced to carry speech they disagree with?
1) The content of calls is not pushed to a dashboard mixed in with things you want to hear algorithmically. This core discovery feature of Twitter means that the content of the messages from people you are not subscribed to must meet some basic criteria of acceptability, or no one would use it.
2) We had common-carrier status applied to ISPs for a few short years before Ajit Pai got that rolled back for Verizon. You might have been able to extend that logic to Twitter and then I could see that as a fair comparison if that was how they were operating. But Twitter would never acquiesce to such an onerous mandate and would lobby hard against it.
> This core discovery feature of Twitter means that the content of the messages from people you are not subscribed to must meet some basic criteria of acceptability, or no one would use it.
If "This is a message from the President of the United States" does not meet the criteria of being something that a user might want to hear, what the hell does? And if the President is saying something completely insane then it's even more important that the people can hear exactly what he says! What would you prefer - you hear the President say an insane thing and you can say "yep, that guy is insane we need to get rid of him" or Twitter tells you "look, uh, just trust us this guy is insane, don't listen to him". In the second scenario, Twitter has all the power, and makes all the decisions about who gets to be an elected official, not you.
> We had common-carrier status applied to ISPs for a few short years before Ajit Pai got that rolled back for Verizon. You might have been able to extend that logic to Twitter and then I could see that as a fair comparison if that was how they were operating. But Twitter would never acquiesce to such an onerous mandate and would lobby hard against it.
"That's not currently how it is" and "Twitter wouldn't like it" don't strike me as particularly good reasons for not having a neutral carrier that accurately tells people the things their elected officials say.
Echoing the sentiments elsewhere in the thread, the office of the President has official avenues such as the White House Press Corps and EAS. I don't think Twitter has a particular duty to preserve or distribute the content of any user no matter who they are. It might be different if this was in the terms of service, or if it was something the executive branch was paying for.
If they changed their business practices to the model used by other network service providers commonly afforded neutral carrier status (i.e. SaaS, ISPs), then I think there might be a case for your second point.
Twitter is a publisher except for purposes of civil liability, and that only because Section 230 specifically, in an effort to promote largely automated, highly scalable, actively curated publication online, specifically exempts them and other similar online publishers from the liability treatment otherwise applicable to publishers.
> Freedom of speech would involve delivering all messages, not just the ones you like.
Why would freedom of speech involve delivering all messages to you, including the ones you don't want? What a strange concept of freedom that involves ceding control to others.
You could choose to unfollow or even block the President if you want. That would be maximal control for the individual. In this case Twitter has made the choice for you.
Twitter is not the be all end all of communicating with the world. That’s absurd and more indicative of a warped Silicon Valley centric worldview that overemphasizes the importance of Twitter and others.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is important, but not so much because it’s the only way for governments to communicate effectively with citizens. That’s absurd.
It doesn't have to be the only way and nobody said it was. It is a way, and an important one that is very effective at reaching a lot of people.
Government has long had the power to commandeer broadcast media when it needs to get a message to the people ("We interrupt this broadcast...") Do we want to do away with that?
For all its flaws, the government is still something every citizen of the US has a say in, however small. I'm not willing to trade that for rule by Twitter executives, however well-intentioned they might be at the present moment.
> Government has long had the power to commandeer broadcast media when it needs to get a message to the people (“We interrupt this broadcast…”)
No, it hasn’t (outside of, say, the Emergency Alert System.) Government addresses (“We interrupt this broadcast…”) are a subject of requests for air time, which broadcast networks usually (but not always) grant.
Your argument is completely flawed. Twitter has no Civic obligation here. As a Corporation they have a fiduciary responsibility, not to the President or his messaging, but to its broader users.
The fact that there was hate speech by a user, in this case the President, means that Twitter acted in support of its broader platform. It has no obligation to the President or to support his preferred communication platform for hate speech.
You don't think citizens have a right to hear exactly what their elected officials say in their own words? Maybe you are happy to outsource your judgement to Twitter. I'm not.
> You don’t think citizens have a right to hear exactly what their elected officials say in their own words?
I don’t think the state has the Constitutional power to compel private parties to relay what officials say outside of exceptional cases, because of freedom of speech and the press.
The right to hear isn’t the right to commandeer others resources to have it relayed to your hearing.
Twitter exists in the US, backed by US laws and the framework of the US society. Their ability to do business rests on contracts upheld by US courts. As such, they have certain responsibilities to the people of the United States.
One of those should be to refrain from using their power as a transmitter of information to manipulate the relationship between the people and their government. Maybe here, they have some noble purpose, do we trust that in the future they always will? Maybe in the future they would delete the accounts of Senators who call for antitrust investigations into Twitter. Who knows? Once they have the power, do you trust them to use it only for things you agree with?
A right to hear without any mechanism to enforce it is pointless.
We place reasonable restrictions on companies that serve the general public to ensure they treat all members of the public fairly. You can't decide not to serve certain customers because you don't like their skin color or religion, for example. Another reasonable requirement for a communications company would be that they accurately relay the communications that their users send, without interfering with or manipulating them to serve the company's own purposes.
Has it been legally established that twitter should be treated like a government platform when governments use it? Can twitter be used and enforced like C-SPAN?
>The question is, do you want a private corporation to dictate whether or not the government of the United States is able to communicate to the citizens?
no and luckily for you it cannot, because if the President of the US wants to speak on public matters he can do so through the White House press room.
However Donald J Trump, despite the fact that he thinks he is somehow synonymous with "The United States government", which he is not, can be thrown off any private platform that deems that necessary. Some people might have forgotten it over the last four years, but Donald Trump and his personal twitter account, and the office of the presidency, are not the same thing.
There are many ways for anyone, let alone a president of the United States, to make his views known. He can call a press conference; call into a host on a favorable network; issue a press release. Somehow the 40-odd presidents of the US whose terms ended before Twitter did get themselves heard from.
Clearly I am not, and strawmanning me won't help the conversation.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you really did miss my point:
Twitter controls access to a very large audience, only rivalled maybe by Facebook. If you get banned from Twitter, you can't easily go and use a competitor. If there were tens or hundreds of Twitters in the world, then yeah, the "being thrown out of a bar" analogy would hold.
Twitter is not bigger than a head of state calling a presser. That audience is on multiple platform and T-dog is in a position to reach out to ANY media and they'll listen - and distribute.
Twitter also has its Terms of Service and we are all expected to follow those. There have been many that have been banned from Twitter for violent and/or hate speech. What makes the President any different? Why should he get held to a different standard?
Exactly. Censorship is done by the government. A private entity can not "censor" anyone, legally. And the idea that the President of the United States is deprived of a platform by this is ludicrous.
> censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
Nothing here says it's only censorship if done by the government. Legally in the USA there's a stark distinction between government & non-governmental censorship. Even then sometimes private entities fall under restrictions like in the case of the FCC & public broadcast networks (see Janet Jackson nip slip, the inability to curse during certain TV/radio programs at certain times, etc). Now whether all of this desirable or not is politically debatable & one we should have. That being said under the current legal structure Twitter is probably in the clear.
I'm generally more curious how these kinds of actions by tech companies don't violate section 230 though. In the early days of the WWW, that was the reason given for not moderating such speech - "if we start moderating any speech then we're not a safe harbor and we have to moderate all speech". Does this mean that these tech companies that are doing moderation expose themselves legally somehow? Or does it just mean that the previous arguments were done in bad faith? Or were there laws passed to refine section 230 in this regard?
My argument was that because of network effects there are only a few dominant platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and that when these platforms take down content, they are in practise preventing that person's message from getting out, i.e. censoring people.
This gives them a lot of power: power to decide which ideas can be disseminated, power to decide which politicians can get elected. So if you favour democracy, you have to be against the power of big tech platforms to shut down discussions they don't like.
(My favoured solution would involve mandate interoperability using ActivityPub and similar protocols, which breaks the dominance of big platforms due to network effects).
What if, by way of uncritically publishing everything that everybody says, Twitter is accessory to treason? Do they have a right to demur? Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in?
> What if, by way of uncritically publishing everything that everybody says, Twitter is accessory to treason?
I'm not sure that a communications network passing on their users' communications would amount to treason.
But let's run with that for instance, and assume it did, in law.
> Do they have a right to demur?
Clearly if a course of action is against the law, they have a legal obligation not to do it. True by definition.
As to whether they have a moral obligation, that's another question entirely, and a rather complex one, as one would have to define what is moral. I would say that a company that wishes to continue operating in a country is going to have to obey the laws of that country.
> Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in?
Well, that all depends on whether transmitting other people's messages constitutes a crime. Realistically, no company is going to do things that would get it shut down (and if they did, they wouldn't do so for long).
> The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
It could very reasonably be seen as a violation of the principle of free speech as well. But it's not a violation of the first amendment. We need both of these concepts so we should be careful.
Agree. Censorship needs at least one type of modifier (are those adjectives?) so it's clear what is being limited. Some is good and some is bad but just "censorship" alone is too ambiguous.
Censorship doesn't need to be done by the government
From Oxford dictionary: "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."
Silicon valley has done a lot of harm over the last few years, and redefining words to mean things that benefit big tech companies is one of the worst things they have done.
The first ammendment only applies to the government, however the government is not the only institution capable of censorship.
> i think communication platforms should allow all (legal) posts
Do you? Really? Seems like everything would just be a spam-and-troll-filled wasteland...
There's nothing that prevents the President from being one of those trolls, and there's no strong reason for any given platform to give him special treatment forever if he persists in that behavior...
What you consider trolling might be someones genuine behavior. And your behavior can be seen as trolling by someone else. I dont want some arbitrary person or company to have the say who is trolling and who is not. Thats why I dont use facebook or twitter.
Yawn. Find less lazy talking points. Let's substitute "kicked out of a bar for being a loud obnoxious asshole" then, because that's also unwelcome despite not being illegal, and maps very well to trolling an online forum.
You're very eager to weaken the private property rights of others, as well as to give a LOT of power to the government (legality as the only consideration) and I don't think these thing would work out for you like you hope.
While I have zero support for Trump supporters, aren't these websites protected by the government with Section 230? This isn't a right granted to these platforms by the constitution either, the fact that these social media are basically shielded from any civil responsibility when it comes user generated content, in fact that what made them thrive at scale... I'm just saying.
The argument over 230 is that one can't pretend to be a utility/platform for communication while at the same time restricting what information is allowed to be published. Lots of these platforms want to have the cake an eat it too; i.e. blacklisting news stories sitewide, banning certain political leanings 21:1, etc. while claiming to be a neutral platform provider that doesn't have a say in what's published.
I didn't take a picture, but one of his responses to the takeover of the Capitol was that "this is what happens" and a renewed demand to throw out the election.
Lots of comments are being voted down disagreeing with the literal definition of censorship.
Whatever your position on this issue, it is certainly alarming that on hackernews intellectual arguments over the meaning of a word are sent down the memoryhole.
Doublespeak is really becoming an issue in our society, and a subset of our population is censoring those that point it out.
Twitter can remove his "platform", while still showing his messages to those who directly followed him. i.e. don't show his messages except to people who specifically followed him.
This is like the Post Office deciding not to deliver mail.
> And incitement of violence has never been protected speech.
I saw an incitement to protest, but I saw nothing encouraging violence. Do you have an links to anything like that?
> This is like the Post Office deciding not to deliver mail.
Twitter isn’t a government corporation with a legally-mandatory monopoly, so, no, its more like me choosing not to pass on something I got from a politician a disagree with.
> You probably wouldn’t be passing it on to several million people, so that comparison isn’t even close.
If freedom of speech and the press is curtailed precisely because the speaker or publisher has a large audience so the curtailment most efficiently gives government control of messaging, that doesn’t make it better.
> Why do you think Twitter is a publisher, in the sense of a newspaper, for example?
Because, like a newspaper, they provide an actively curated compilation of information received from a variety of contracted sources to readers. Sure, much (but not all) of the curation is algorithmic, and the direct sources are mostly not under employment contract and not getting paid money for the content (either providing it for free or paying money for reach), while for most newspapers many of the direct sources would be under employment contract and they and others would be getting paid money for the input they provide into the curated product, but that difference doesn't seem particularly relevant to whether Twitter is a publisher. And, yes, a lot of the algorithmic curation is driven by explicit reader expression of preference, and some of the rest is driven by inferred reader preference from reader behavior. But that the curated product is highly personalized also doesn't seem relevant to how free expression rights apply to curation choices.
For purposes of civil liability, Twitter is not a “publisher” solely because of Section 230, but since we are discussing how the Constitution applies to them (which Congress could not change by statute) not how civil liability applies to them, that's not relevant.
Oh cool, so it’s okay if Facebook removes every post about and by BLM? Because they certainly incited a great deal of violence this summer.
Enough of the Doublespeak. It’s censorship, albeit by a private entity. When it inevitably happens to the left, I’ll call it censorship then too and I’ll advocate against it.
> so it’s okay if Facebook removes every post about and by BLM?
It's ok in the sense that they have every legal right to do so. It would lose them a ton of goodwill though, so they probably wouldn't do it. That's the free market at work.
He said “they certainly incited a great deal of violence this summer.” I qualified that statement, which was worded to imply substantially more violence than what actually occurred.
I thought HN discussions were based on facts rather than political biases.
The concepts and values of free speech and open discourse are more than the legal requirements of the First Amendment. Coordinated private censorship by oligopolistic platforms that have largely replaced the public square is contrary to the value of freedom of speech.
They are anything but countless. There’s a specific number of unarmed Black people who are killed each year by police. That number is typically less than 30.
You're implying that destroying innocent people's property and starting riots that lead to deaths, including 18 murders in Chicago alone on May 31st, is a justified response to an act of injustice, which is an absolutely irresponsible moral outlook, exhibiting morally elitist entitlement.
In fact, it would be the 'incitement to riot' that the parent comment is referring to, that an impartial application of the proposed rule would identify as worthy of banning.
If you keep posting like that we will ban you. I'm not going to ban you right now because you've also posted some ok comments within recent memory, but the not-ok comments are seriously not ok. No more of this, please.
Sorry, I'll try to not incite flame wars. In my defense, anything related to these kinds of issues is highly likely to rouse emotions. The only way these topics can even brought up without a flame war is if every one agrees, and no one expresses a dissenting viewpoint. Just Food for Thought.
But yes I could certainly have been less provocative.
> anything related to these kinds of issues is highly likely to rouse emotions.
You can say that again! And yet the seemingly innocuous mandate of this site—gratification of intellectual curiosity—actually requires us all to work hard at not succumbing to that dynamic. If you think about it (well, when I think about it), two odd things follow from that: (1) this is a rather larger project than it seems; (2) it's actually doable.
Yes it is doable. I made a mistake in how I dealt with inflammatory comments, in responding in kind instead of reporting it. I wrongly assumed moderation was more lax, and the forum was more of a free-for-all, than they are.
Equating protests with riots is a bit nonsensical. We should consider how the police has treated black people for the last 100+ years, to start. Protests like these have been long overdue.
I don't understand your point. There were widespread riots across the US during the summer of BLM, with many police forces standing down in the face of them.
And your point about black people in no way justifies the indiscriminate violence perpetrated by the rioters.
At what point does brutalizing innocent people become a justified response to injustice?
The answer is at no point.
Any way, from what I recall 350,000 white men died fighting for the Union, in a civil war to end an institution that had existed since the beginning of human culture, and that continued to be practiced all around the world into the 20th century until imperialist powers ended it.
I thought the riots were about the abuse inflicted upon George Floyd. Sorry for not being adequately sensitive. I think you're over-reacting a bit and it shows misplaced priorities.
Your accusation lacks the generosity of a benefit of the doubt.
It could be the fact that George Floyd's death triggered the movement, that his character figured centrally in it, and hashtags of his name were the primary symbol of it.
But instead you take the typical high handed approach of the moral elitist movement.
I don't consider myself a tolerant person, especially when it comes to obtuseness. You are engaging in a bad faith argument by purposefully being obtuse.
If you're acting in good faith, maybe consider your news bubble? Try places other than hackernews, it's demographic is upper middle class white men who are completely engaged to capitalism, which makes for some pretty horrific discussions.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines with flamewar, personal attacks, and ideological battle, and ignoring our many requests to stop. Not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I had this conversation earlier. I think it is a natural question to compare the two similar acts in terms of violent/destructive rioting. Especially so since they are individually representative of both ends of the growing political distance between left/right in our country.
My logic is not perfect by any means but I see a key difference between;
1) BLM was a group of citizens protesting against what is essentially abuse of power/government and they want change. They want legislative action that holds cops accountable. Doesn't matter if you agree with it, but this cause and their right to protest is the most American thing I've seen in a long time. Sure, there are people that took it too far and protesting turned to rioting. But protesting for action and change are patriotic acts.
2) On the other hand, today's events are almost opposite. It's been driven/lead by senior members of government. Using lies and propaganda, conditioning a group of citizen sympathizers over a long period of time to distrust media, distrust opposing "facts" or anyone that disagrees with Trumps agenda. Weaponize this group of people to seize power and considerably fracture our democracy. It's the least patriotic and perhaps treasonous thing I could ever imagine. But they think they are the patriots. It's just so backwards to me.
Your logic is impeccable, but there is a lot of strawmaning and questionable assumptions.
It seems likely that the entire political spectrum wants cops held accountable. It is a fairly non-partisan issue that corruption of the police is a massive problem. The right wing hates the idea of people not following the rules, and the left is usually suspicious of the police at best.
And you've judging a right to protest about the corruption of the police force as morally American while protesting corruption in the electoral process is somehow unpatriotic. Those are both extremely civic things to be protesting, the equivalence is very strong. Both are core US principles of freedom and self governance.
Also the idea that the right wing protestors are more organised than the left is extremely suspect. The left are stereotypically much more organised and mobilised for protest - left wing politics has a long and proud history of working effectively through mass movements. Protestors are one of the pools the left wing draws its candidates for (there is that wonderfully classic photo of Bernie Sanders being arrested, for example). Trump is a more iconic figurehead but the left has far more effective logistical and advocacy support around protests. BLM protest leaders quite possibly are going to be a part of the next generation of Democrat leadership.
> On the other hand, today's events are almost opposite. It's been driven/lead by senior members of government. Using lies and propaganda, conditioning a group of citizen sympathizers over a long period of time to distrust media, distrust opposing "facts" or anyone that disagrees with Trumps agenda. Weaponize this group of people to seize power and considerably fracture our democracy. It's the least patriotic and perhaps treasonous thing I could ever imagine. But they think they are the patriots. It's just so backwards to me.
This is correct to a degree but it is debunked by the President's plain language in his speech prior to the violence at the Capitol where he asked the crowd to "peacefully and patriotically" protest at the Capitol.
It becomes difficult to make the accusation that the violence is incited when it is very explicitly said that the protest should be peaceful.
During the nomination of Justice Kavanaugh, members of Congress were confronted in elevators and hallways of the Capitol building by protesters. These protests were also based on unproven accusations and the people were weaponized to seize power as a ploy because they did not have the requisite votes as per the constitutional process. Intimidation and invasion of the building was seen very differently when it came to a lifelong appointment of a Supreme Court justice.
I would argue that the politicians from both parties share blame in allowing the discourse to escalate like this. To condemn only one party for it is not helpful at all.
I think a lot of posts on HN are purposefully contradictory or otherwise "not getting it" simply to generate discussion and make sure many sides of a topic are discussed.
The deleted tweets could be considered "a lie" or whatever but srsly nothing in there justifies deleting it. He's actively calling for peace, law & order and to let the blue do their job.
The problem with censorship is that ###### and that you cant #####. There is also no way to argue why you agree/disagree with it because #######.
> He's actively calling for peace, law & order and to let the blue do their job.
What a wild selective (mis)reading of his Twitter account. Did you miss the parts where he said he loved the people who stormed the Capitol with rifles today? Or the part where he said the vice president should just declare him the winner of the election?
Like I said call it a "lie" if he says dumb/not true stuff. He could say Stalin was a great person or whatever who cares. I certainly dont need or want twitter to decide whether that should be read or not.
>Did you miss the parts where he said he loved the people who stormed the Capitol with rifles today?
He never said that that that's just total nonsense not even misinterpretation that straight made up BS.
You could just as well says he said he loves rapists because it happens to be that at least one of the person at the protest was a convicted rapist. If that's how you interpret things from someone you dont like you have a serious problem with reality.
Hes speech was to the people who attender the protest not specifically to thous who entered the building which obviously where a minority. And even if he included the people who entered the building he did not encourage them in any way to do anything they should not do, in fact if he includes them he too told them to go home peacefully.
I have no clue what you interpret into this that isn't there.
"We" is him and his supporters, "you" are the people that supported him. There is nothing controversial. And noting that could somehow be spinned to make it bad. But somehow you still see something evil in there. Its called bias.
We is him, you is the people on the Capitol grounds. The rest of the message sets the context that this is clearly aimed at the protestors. I don't know what's preventing you from seeing this.
That literally what I said. He speaks to all the people there not specifically to thous who broke laws. And he called for peace, law and order and to go home. But somehow you came to the conclusion that "he said he loved the people who stormed the Capitol with rifles today" Cant you see how biased that is? You just picked the <0.001% of protestors that apparently stormed the capitol with rifles.
Why not pick the >90% while people just pretend that he only addresses them and thus only love white people so he must be racist right? You can make up any shit you want with such a retarded non-logic way of interpreting what he clearly said to all the people there.
Facebook, Twitter,Reddit and the classic media where the key enabling factor to Trump. They reward the most brash, most outspoken statements - which quickly became the most hateful and partisan.
They need to do a lot more then this.
(And that cuts both ways, daily there is anti-religious hatred on reddit's front page, or covid quacks on twitter). Falsehoods get more clicks then the truth, and they have been ridding that.
I recently noticed that about reddit. I thought it was just a time wasting site with a political bias. But actually it is a site for spreading false information. Maybe it doesn't get called out often because it's a bit smaller than FB. But for its 50M+ DAU, I presume that false information must be harmful.
Big omnibus social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) is about to split by political lines.
Driven by divise events like this; a group of popular figures and their followers will leave omnibus social media in favour of platforms aligned with their political views.
For example: Right-wingers leave Twitter for Parler, Youtube for Bitchute.
Ultimately social media will be a bit like newspapers; each outlet with their own particular affiliation and no single dominant outlet.
"Democracy" at work. Had this happened in 2011-2012 in some forsaken Middle-East country all the mainstream media would have cried "wolf".
Also, I cannot understand brandishing those people that entered the Capitol as "terrorists", again this coming from the mainstream media. I think the exact same speech was made by the Chinese communist media in regards to the Hong Kong protesters who had occupied the territory's legislative chamber.
Whatever one thinks of Trump, it seems quite stupid of him to put so much of ability to communicate with his followers in the hands of a company that obviously disagreed with him.
If I were President Trump I would've ordered the creation of an official US government Social Media site and used that. Alternatively, I would've used Mastodon.
His ego prevents that. He relishes in the number of followers/likes/retweets and would have far fewer of these on a website of his own site, so he sticks with Twitter.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
4h
I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
4h
Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!
> "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"
This is a transcript of his video message which you linked that was removed by Twitter. I'll hold off on commentary/speculation of why it would have been removed.
> I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.
> It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us, from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people.
> We have to have peace, so go home. We love you, you’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel, but go home and go home in peace.
Twitter intentionally did it. They benefit from controversy since more people use the platform to tweet about events and go to the platform to read about the events. Gotta get those clicks.
For anyone who is happy about this, imagine if it was done to the politician you support.
"But but but my favorite politician is not an orange racist fascist Nazi piece of shit", you'll probably say, but that doesn't matter. Imagine him being silenced anyway, because "Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform", and the platform owners might suddenly decide that it is in their political interest to silence their political opponents.
Would you still honestly think that it is perfectly fine?
You missed the point where I was asking you to imagine a situation where he is silenced anyway. For defending democratic institutions, for example. This happens to russian opposition rather frequently, and on privately owned platforms.
It's important to fight the Trumps and would-be-Trumps of the US now before they can gather enough power to take us further down that road.
Trump being held to the same rules as everyone else[0] by a private party despite being a politician is basically the OPPOSITE of the government having so much power that even private parties will silence people the government doesn't like. So yes, I think it's VITALLY important to protect the rights of private Americans to NOT have to be mouthpieces for the government if they disagree.
[0] well, actually, he's still getting some kid gloves, but it's an improvement
I don't think you understand. This problem is larger than Trump. Big platforms will be around far longer than he. And they have unchecked power to create narratives in favor of one side, which their opposition won't be able to breach. The supported side will eventually (and inevitably) gain power, and then these private platform will be censoring opposition just because they don't like people speaking up against the government the platform supports. And it'll all be pretty legal.
It absolutely does matter. It's crazy to draw an equivalence between other bad things politicians do and sending goons to take over the legislature. When you attempt a coup, you don't get to claim a right to neutral treatment by media platforms.
Yes. I don't put much weight towards the complaints about this
1) there's the facist counter-argument "you shouldn't be able to silence the government," where the government having the ability to force me to repeat what they say scares me more than a company saying "I won't republish that"
2) there's this one, the "what if it was your favored politician"; this is pretty old news; not everything every politican says is published in every news outlet, editorial selection is as old as time, and we have to hope that there is enough competition in the market that things that resonate with lots of people find publishers (if anything, right now we seem to be suffering from being way beyond this, where we even have a lot of publishers for straight garbage nonsense). But this particular instance is an extra-weak-sauce one: nobody NEEDS twitter. Especially not the president!
3) and there's another angle where I think it's important that people act in line with their beliefs, not just with their wallets or their ad view counts, in order to preserve our democracy. There will always be bad actors. Trump is a bad actor. We can't simply throw up our hands and say "we have to accept all the bad actors because we might not always get it 100% right if we try to fight the bad actors." That supposed cure - doing nothing - is worse than the disease!
"Is this person a dangerous nutjob who cares more about their own power than the health of the country" is one of those things that affects which politicians I support, so I'm not TERRIBLY worried about politicians I support falling into this particular trap. Since I believe this is an exceptional moment, I think exceptional action is warranted and am less concerned with supposed precedent. Twitter and Facebook spent 5 years being huge enablers for Trump, even though they never liked his politics, after all, going back to the start of his campaign. Clearly they're willing to tolerate a LOT.
You are simply biased and this unable to perceive the situation objectively. The issue of social platforms silencing 'wrong' political positions is far more reaching than the current problem with trump, with potential dire consequences.
For now, the situation plays into your liking, because you think 'Trump is a bad actor'. But what would you sing when you'll be supporting the bad actor?
Simple example: Russian opposition is considered 'bad actors' in Russia by privately owned (by friends of Putin) tech giants, and is silenced on local social media.
Provoking and supporting armed insurrection and occupation of the Capitol as a lame-duck president in order to overturn an election is far, far more dangerous than anything you've just described.
Try seeing beyond the current situation. I don't care about trump. I care about monopolistic platforms openly abandoning their neutrality.
Imagine a world where the online speech is shaped to the liking of a platform owner. It will logically lead to winning elections and forming government by the side supported by such platform, which will of course stay private to legally censor anti-government speech, which, in turn, will make replacement of said government nearly impossible via elections. If you don't see any problems with that, well, I rest my case.
What a great idea. Of course you should do this! What could go wrong?
Now remember that someday the tables will turn. Someday the bad orange man‘s side will have control of the media, and I expect you to support when they suppress the other side’s speech just as it was done to them today. Because we all know freedom of speech is good except when the other side has it.
Yes. That’s precisely how I structure my thinking. It is incumbent on me to imagine the results of policies that I support going wrong.
For example, I tend to be slightly on the side of the death penalty. That means I have to imagine that a loved one of mine could be falsely accused of a crime and be executed for it. It would be morally reprehensible for me not to imagine all consequences of something I believe in.
Likewise, anyone against the death penalty should imagine the case, for example, where their own children are killed and the murderer isn’t punished similarly.
There are usually principle of arguments on both sides and I feel it’s important for me to account for them.
Trump's side and Twitter's side are both very far from what I see as moral. I'm not waiting until the tables turn from bad to worse to be horrified. I'm horrified now. Sure, I'd be horrified even if people I generally agreed with were the ones censoring. It's might-is-right level stuff.
Twitter's censorship is just one aspect of the issue. Talented philosophers, scientists, etc. are being excluded from mainstream society (forced out of their education, employment, etc.) for having the wrong opinions. Many of the smartest people I know exist almost entirely outside of established institutions. Not a good situation. Very sad that people have so much respect for those in power.
Moral? The Hayes Codes is long gone. Tell me, if you were a lawyer, would you have defended the neo-nazis right to march down Skokie's Main Street where tons of Holocaust survivors settled down after escaping Germany?
> would you have defended the neo-nazis right to march down Skokie's Main Street where tons of Holocaust survivors settled down after escaping Germany?
I would do it in a heartbeat. Of course I detest racism. Of course I think those marches were an act of evil. But the test of a freedom-loving people is how we protect the despised, not how we protect the majority. If we don't protect the freedoms of those we dislike, we will lose our own freedoms soon enough.
There's an argument to be made that some things which are considered freedoms should not be considered freedoms because they can result in harm. At what point does protecting one exercise of one right of the despised outweigh the consequences of those actions?
It's not about the people we dislike, it's about how those people - or anyone - acts, and the results of those actions. I still disapprove regardless of who it is who wants to march under a Nazi banner.
Maybe society should have concerns not only along the lines of freedom. Or at least, to integrate both positive and negative liberty. Other Western democratic nations have balanced freedom and dignity quite well.
>Tell me, if you were a lawyer, would you have defended the neo-nazis right to march down Skokie's Main Street where tons of Holocaust survivors settled down after escaping Germany?
If I was a lawyer I would have done that if that's what I was employed to do.
Hayes code seems irrelevant: what was being discussed was people feeling less positive about censorship when those who they thought were moral were being censored (rather than those thought to be immoral).
> Trump's side and Twitter's side are both very far from what I see as moral.
I happen to feel the same way about his predecessor. But I always supported Obama‘s use of the bully pulpit. Even though I agreed with very little of his core politics, I feel it’s the right of the president to use freedom of speech, period.
Also, regarding morality. Because I believe in freedom of speech, I support the right of people to write and say immoral things. Even reprehensible things. And if we choose to suppress such speech, we should expect it to go underground and fester and explode painfully at the worst possible time.
Much better in my view that these things be examined and rebutted in the public sphere.
have you read his tweets? this has nothing to do with free speech. You are free to post as much conservative philosophy on twitter as you want, but you can't post blatantly treasonous and violence-inciting falsehoods. Twitter allows the accounts of 99% of republicans to go completely uncensored. This is not about censoring the right, it's about protecting our republic and way of life from a violent demagogue. We don't want another Mussolini on our hands.
For the record, I lean conservative/libertarian on most issues
I see no evidence of treason and violence incitement by the president, but the great news is we have a court system that can deal with these things. I assume you want all incitement of violence by all Twitter accounts to result in the same kind of censorship, correct?
> Twitter allows the accounts of 99% of republicans to go completely uncensored.
Did you watch the video that was deleted? IMO it is treasonous to blatantly put forth completely baseless election conspiracy theories in order to undermine our democracy. Trump directly encouraged the insurrection today to "Stop the Steal", in other words, to start a coup to forcefully end our democracy and instate himself as our autocrat. This is blatant treasonous behavior
Many people here seems happy for these news. From now on never talk about censorship. Your position on this situation will give you right to talk about censor. America is ruled by tech giants. Forget trump. You will be the first country that will be governed by companies.
Twitter has just made the most aggressive move they can against 70M americans who voted for this person 2 months ago.
Furthermore, they didn't give the sitting POTUS a chance to de-escalate the situation.
If his tweets are causing problems, then send them to a moderator queue and have a discussion with him about what he is saying, don't slap duct tape over his mouth.
Provide a contact method for him to discuss the tweets with whoever is making the decision to silence him.
It's not fair to portray this as if a corporation removed someones means of communications.
The POTUS will be able to appear on any mass media, the only difference is that the media that he will appear likely will be moderated. When he says something, there would be a few people commenting on it and analysing it. This someone could be someone from CNN/FOX/Breitbart etc, so anyone can choose their own moderator that they trust.
This is essentially removing the unchecked propaganda channel of a politician that is causing real life problems.
> Twitter has just made the most aggressive move they can against 70M americans who voted for this person 2 months ago.
I wouldn't say "against". Rehab will be hard, but the life and health of those 70M Americans will improve by this move. Those poor people were basically suffering from a chronic poisoning of chortisol for 4 whole years of non-stop artificial outrage
They suspended Trump's personal account. Not the official president account. They didn't stop him from going on live tv or radio or sending out press releases or going on twitch or going on facebook or any of tons of other media outlets.
This is blatant censorship of the President of the United States, regardless of anyone's thoughts or opinions about him.
Edit: It may be fun to downvote and might make some feel great for a period of time, but it doesn't change the fact that the President of the country of free speech is being censored.
The constitution also lays out what crimes a president can be impeached for. I have to explicitly say this so people don’t misinterpret my words: I’m not supporting trump, I’m talking from a purely scholastic position.
You can look up respected legal scholars from Georgetown who came to This conclusion during Clinton’s impeachment
Four people are dead and their blood is on the hands of everyone who promoted or allowed these conspiracy theories to spread for the past four years under the guise of civil discourse.
Please stop posting like this—it's obviously against the site guidelines. Deploying horrific rhetoric against "every single Hacker News moderator" doesn't change that.
Edit: you posted this four times. Doing that kind of thing will get you banned here. Also, it looks you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle, and we ban accounts that do that, irrespective of what your ideology is. If you'd please review the rules and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.
This is a site for curiosity. People can't both be curious and battling enemies at the same time. The nervous system doesn't work that way.
The issue isn't ideology per se, but rather the universal flamewar that ideological battle leads to. Hell is relative and that hell is far worse than this one.
Stunning. Regardless of political lean, and the inevitable Supreme Court hearing on this action, it is unprecedented that a company has the power to silence a sitting president.
Twitter holds the power, but do they not also by definition hold the responsibility of the content on their platform when it costs lives?
Didn't any media company in US history have at all times the power not to publish statements by the US President? Why should the US President have command over their printing press/servers? It's not like Twitter has a monopoly, either.
Why is $ELECTED_OFFICIAL using a private platform to disseminate communications related to the office, instead of using a public service to do the same? Did Twitter ask for that? Does a private company have to allow public officials (esp. non-law-enforcement) to use its platform as they wish--don't we have a 3rd amendment for a reason?
Same kinda of thing they have done in the past the First Amendment trumps companies rights
> ... noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
IANAL, but I think there’s a pretty substantial difference between “prevent distribution” and “refuse to publish”. There are some cases in 1A caselaw where mandatory publishing is a thing, but they’re extraordinarily limited and generally public health/safety oriented and proscribed by the state.
I’d be shocked if even this court went so far as to mandate a private company devote its resources to providing content that violates its own rules.
Twitter is a private entity that can do whatever they want with their platform. If he or his supporters don’t like that he’s welcome to leave for another platform.. parler was created for this.
Perhaps grab a mirror and look for some personal responsibility?
If only the President had some sort of way to get a message out…perhaps something like a conference…with the press…I don’t know, it’s obviously an idea ripe for disruption.
(Or he could post a message to the White House website.)
I mean ... they don't. Twitter is really not that big of a deal. Removing his ability to tweet means ... almost nothing. He can still talk to the press, post to other social media, hold press conferences from the white house press room, he has no shortage of ways of getting his message out there.
This is unconscionable and monstrous for Twitter. If the President wanted to call for peace -- now he cannot. If the President wanted to send a message of humility and introspection -- he is unable to. If the President wanted to bring us together during these trying times -- we have shut the door. His last message was a message of love, and some of us were too blind to see it for what it truly is.
And if the President wanted to escalate? Like he has been doing for 2 months now?
Also, he's currently the president of the united states. Was the president of the united states completely unable to communicate with the country before twitter?
