I don’t understand. Wasn’t the President himself constantly asking the media to do as he liked? If Twitter felt compelled by the Democratic campign, why wouldn’t they have felt compelled by the GOP too? Did Twitter somehow foresee that the election, which was so narrow that it took until the weekend to call it, would be won by the Dems and not the GOP, and that therefore they should comply with the Dems’ requests and not the President’s?
Trump did the same for four years. (“Failing New York Times” etc. if you remember?) If Twitter acted because of coercion by the government, violating 1A, why were they not also corerced by Trump?
Nobody, including Twitter, had a crystal ball that told them that Trump was going to lose the election. Trump was in government and Biden wasn’t.
So you do not disagree with the following statement at all then: "The biden team, was behind the scenes trying to get content/speech removed from a major platform."
You could have just said "yes, I agree with you. Thats what happened."
Actually I am saying this : "The biden team, was behind the scenes trying to get content/speech removed from a major platform.".
And I am saying that this has a chilling effect on speech.
At no point did I say that the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Biden to be arrested for life for 1st amendment violations, or whatever other strawman that I did not say.
So, once again. You could have just said "Yes, you are correct. Biden's team did reach out to a platform to have content removed. "
> And I am saying that this has a chilling effect on speech.
See, I don’t agree with this. Trump tried to achieve the exact opposite. He and many in the GOP made it clear that they wanted the Hunter story to be kept on the agenda. If Twitter was pushed leftward by the Biden team, they were also pushed rightward by Trump and the GOP who wanted Twitter to do the exact opposite.
The outcome is at best a net zero chilling effect.
There is no logical reason to believe that a candidate has a greater chilling effect than the sitting President and the Senate majority. You have to believe in some sort of a conspiracy to think that this was the case.
> u have to believe in some sort of a conspiracy to think that this was the case.
I am saying that an action has a chilling effect.
No matter how many times you bring up other actions, it remains the case that the action that I brought up has a chilling effect.
What you are doing is engaging in bad faith, by using a tactic called "whataboutism". No matter what your opinions are, on other politicians, my original point stands.
A former president, who is running for president, having their team reach to to a social media platform to have content removed, has a chilling effect, regardless of anything else that other politicians are doing.
If you are a bad faith actor, then you can continue to engage in whataboutism, without directly engaging with this point, I guess.
I’m sorry, the reason that I’m bringing up Trump is not whataboutism. But to point out that Biden was not in government, there was no clear expectation that he would ever be in government again, and that if Twitter made its decisions about those tweets based on political leverage, then they would have left the tweets up instead of removing them.
> But to point out that Biden was not in government
Things can still have a chilling effect even if someone is not literally in government right now.
Such as, for example, if the team making the requests is the political campaign of a former vice president, who is currently running for president.
No matter what bad things you think other people have done, it does not invalidate this point.
If your next statement is something of the effect of "Well what about this other thing that this other politician did!" in any way or reference what so ever, I am just going to take that as you admitting that you are acting in bad faith.
