This ban seems to heavily take advantage of the current moment, as it's obvious that he has tweeted worse things in the past.
It's strange that they picked such a poor way to justify the ban when they could have made a significantly stronger case, and in doing so could have convinced millions more people that they are trying their best to apply policies evenly. For example, I have a hard time imagining why they chose to specifically quote "American Patriots", as if that somehow contributes to the straw that broke the camel's back. Perhaps they have a strategic reason for going about this how they did, but I think it will have some negative 2nd/3rd order effects. that they haven't yet realized.
I imagine we are still only in the early days of the conflicts that are to come in this sphere (and I'd include just about every company and political faction in them, unfortunately).
(Also because apparently I have to state this explicitly in every comment related to Trump: I do not support Trump, his supporters, the recent events that occurred at the capitol, etc etc)
It's really important realize this distinction. Imagine a newspaper printing a letter to the editor from a person whose words have previously incited a riot.
I find it surprising that they enabled the account again at all after the 6th.
In the terrorism of the 60s through to the 90s a common demand in hostage situations was to have a letter read out in the media. The PFLP would do it, the Red Army Brigades, even the Unabomber demanded his manifesto be printed
They needed to take hostages to get published because most media wouldn't air their messaging because of their support of violence
In the modern age they'd all have free platforms and likely amplification.
You also can't rule out that if they had a platform, they'd use it to incite others to resort to violence on their behalf. For example, the Unabomber's manifesto expresses his belief that violence was necessary to provoke revolution against the technological society. The Unabomber's bombings were the "pre-violence" required to get his ideas out there, of which of which a violent revolution was one.
Censorship driving people to violence in this case is much like a girl being pretty driving a goon to rape. The cause of the act in both cases is the perpetrators warped sense of ownership. Specifically ownership of other's thoughts, body, and time. They would feel entitled to that ownership whether met with resistence or not. In this case censorship seems reasonable otherwise you end up tacitly fostering the perpetrators view of ownership with your submission.
Given Trumps comments about women and Giuliani getting caught with his hands down their.
The statement "not able to keep his hands in his pocket" is super on point.
Your account has been using the site primarily (exclusively even?) for political and ideological battle. That's the line at which we ban accounts, regardless of which politics or ideology they're battling for (see [1] for more explanation). We have to, because it destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation, not smiting enemies.
I've therefore banned your account. 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. The rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I believe they did so to fire a warning shot, to be able to argue later that they were not banning immediately. I bet they knew that guy wouldn’t be able to keep his thumbs in his pockets – and that’s 100% on him.
"[Looting] also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that's unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free."
"Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that's a part of it that doesn't really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory."
"But there's also another factor, which is anti-Blackness and contempt for poor people who want to live a better life, which looting immediately provides. One thing about looting is it freaks people out. But in terms of potential crimes that people can commit against the state, it's basically nonviolent. You're mass shoplifting. Most stores are insured; it's just hurting insurance companies on some level. It's just money. It's just property. It's not actually hurting any people."
How is this incitement to looting? The 'examining' in question is a highly critical interview which is pretty much interviewer Isaac Chotiner's thing. The piece is the opposite of what you are suggesting it is.
You're right, the Isaac Chotiner piece is more balanced, but the original NPR interview absolutely isn't. I couldn't find the original NPR interview on the NPR homepage, so I--confusingly, in retrospect--linked the Chotiner followup, which was on the front page of a major publication.
Also I should add that the original NPR interview was on the "front page" of link aggregator sites like reddit and hn, because that's where I originally saw it.
This echoes a meme traveling around TheDonald right now, that Twitter booted Trump but allowed leftists to circulate "hang Mike Pence". The tops of those threads are people who don't realize that "hang Mike Pence" is a reference to something the rioters chanted; the bottoms include appeals for Pence's execution.
That's a far cry from a temper tantrum of repeated lies about nonexistent fraud, and a "stolen" election for the sole, self-aggrandizing purpose of inciting rowdy, racist rednecks to literally break into—and tromp literal shit through—our hallowed house of power, endangering our lawmakers trying to do their jobs.
Additionally I believe wholesale banning the leader of a country from a platform like twitter is not black or white. Their persona is different and requires different treatment than any other given account.
I suspect two factors went into the calculus this time: he has proved himself desperately dangerous AND he's got less than 2 weeks left in his term.
Don't forget GA - Dems won full control, and will now have at least some ability to legislate. So Twitter et al need to be thinking about how to get ahead of the complaints that the left has against section 230 (the left hates it because they are not forced to aggressively moderate, the right hates it because they are allowed to moderate at all). This was not looking likely to be something they had to worry about until the surprise sweep in Georgia, so I'd argue that may have played as big a role as the craziness in DC.
Isn’t that the way laws work? You can’t prosecute someone until they’ve committed a crime. The issue here is whether the “crime” is tweeting stuff that starts an insurrection, or tweeting stuff that could be interpreted as potentially starting an insurrection.
Me telling someone to go fuck themselves probably isn’t a problem, but me telling someone with learning difficulties to go fuck themselves and them feeling compelled to do it and hurting themselves probably is a problem.
Oh well, there's hundreds of tweets by US politicians threatening violence against other nations (Iran or N.Korea or Syria). That's what nations do, right?
"We will support and assist any nation or any group anywhere who opposes and fights the Zionist regime."
Now compare that to the Trump tweets that prompted his suspension, according to the Twitter statement:
"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!"
"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."
To claim that the second set of Tweets incites violence more than the first is absurd. Yes, context matters, but it also matters for the Ayatollah tweets. When the leader of Iran advocates "armed resistance" to the state of Israel, we know exactly what that means.
He tweeted praise for the rioters and justified the riot while the riot to stop the constitutional process of the peaceful transfer of power was in progress.
How are Khamenei's tweets any different from those of US politicians against Iran or other "enemy" nations? Should we apply the same standard to US politicians who have tweeted threats to Iran or supported actions aimed to the collapse of Iranian regime?
Come on, Twitter has been banning plenty of users for posting blatantly anti-Semitic dog-whistles like "the Zionist regime". It's quite clear that Khamenei is getting preferential treatment.
So in this case he might be technically correct in identifying the exact people he opposes... Possibly.
Iran is a bit weird, they actually have a seat of parliament reserved for a Jewish representative. See here for details of the current holder of this seat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Motamed
> Come on, Twitter has been banning plenty of users for posting blatantly anti-Semitic dog-whistles like "the Zionist regime". It's quite clear that Khamenei is getting preferential treatment.
Twitter overtly adopted rules granting high government officials this preferential treatment to justify not acting on the many complaints of Trump's flagrant violation of what were previously nominally universally applicable rules on the platform at the outset of his term.
So, yes, Khamenei gets preferential treatment compared to the average user (as did Trump); that's the overt policy.
"Zionist regime" is not an anti-semitic "dogwhistle" (trendy term used to assign words whatever meaning you like, disregarding the literal one). It's a derogatory appellative for a country. Zionism is a political ideology and Israel is a country engaged in blatant apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
Presumably, while Don, Jr. did the same thing when making the same complaint, you mean “Iran’s Supreme Leader”, which is a unique position. There are a large number of Ayatollahs (and even several Grand Ayatollahs, including Supreme Leader Khamenei).
According to Twitter's public statement, Trump's rule violation was incitement of violence, not "advocating for the abolition of his own government."
The Ayatollah has repeatedly tweeted in support of the violent destruction of the state of Israel. If that's not incitement of violence, I don't know what is.
Reminder that trump did and said the same things for a long time. It’s only once the mob actually showed up that they banned him. If the ayatollah was saying “go here and destroy this building” and it got done then they’d ban him based on this precedent
It’s also a funny argument to me because you have people comparing trump to the ayatollah and mao and thinking it helps their case.
While private businesses, homes, and police precincts were burning, many politicians were promoting more rioting and reminding us that "rioting is the voice of the unheard."
I have come to this realization recently as well. "Deplatforming" people of significant real-world power, or largely any world leader, is notably different than deplatforming an average person. A lot of comments I feel are conflating the effects of banning an average person, or an average person trying to become more well-known ("candidate Trump"), with an established world leader.
People with power have real consequences on the life of each individual. I admit I don't know how to treat those two groups but I don't think the arguments used for the average person are the same arguments that should be applied to world leaders, and vice versa.
Actually, deplatforming a world leader has less power. He could call a press conference and say whatever he wants at any time. He could order his staff to setup a 24x7 conference call and just literally pick up a phone and rant about anything he wants at any time, and have millions of people listening.
That was what I meant to imply, although my comment did not come across that way. Deplatforming a world leader affects that individual less than an average user.
Except Trump can't call a press conference; not really. He hasn't been able to stand up to sustained real press questioning for years. That's why there have been essentially zero real press conferences at the White House lately.
I don't disagree.
But sedition isn't protected speech. So if they didn't ban him they're opening themselves up for lawsuits.
In no country on earth is it legal for anyone to publicly advocate the overthrow of their government. And there's already decisions on the books proving this, as well as the legal precedent of cold-war anti-communism laws.
He has been laying the ground work for this since at least last summer to hedge against an election loss. He has been sitting baseless accusations about mail-in ballots, solve he knew Democrats would be more likely to vote by mail because they took the pandemic seriously. What was the "stop the steal" slogan supposed to accomplish other than create the overthrowing of the legitimately elected president? If he had legal ground he wouldn't have needed a slogan, but just won his court battles.
No one has looked at the present election based off claims 8 months ago, people witnessed openly irregular behavior during the actual election and after.
The current fervor around silencing, labeling, and berating rather than reassuring fears and assisting in auditing to legitimize the election is a significant problem and not a healthy look.
The fact that there even is a discussion about whether what he's saying really is sedition is enough. They're a private company, that just opens them up to way too much liability. It's not their responsibility to be a platform for all sides, for better or for worse
Twitter was very happy when after vote fraud in other countries it was helping to promote revolutions, several years ago. Section 230 specifically frees them from responsibility if they behave as a platform and opens to much more liability if they decide to filter out some speech.
You should read Section 230. It doesn’t say that if you filter some speech that you have liability. In fact it says quite the opposite: if you make a good faith effort to filter some speech then you aren’t liable.
listen to his speech inciting his followers to go to the capitol. You can decide if it’s sedition or not, but the end result is undeniably an insurrection, and his words are what directly invited them to do this.
> Mob actually materializes and several people die - Twitter sure they now have to take him literally
Angry groups of protesters and resulting deaths are not a thing that started happening this week. Twitter are pathetic and have taken a stand once the writing was on the wall.
I’m not defending race rioting. But the context of the riots that occurred over race and the riot that occurred where a mob was two doorways away from killing members of congress is contextually important, as is the fact that the capital rioters answered to exactly one (1) person. And the fact that that one person who had the power to call in the national guard to prevent such deaths appeared uninterested in doing so.
Yeah their hesitation shouldn't have happened.
They shouldn't have issued those weird corrections to his statements either, they would have had MORE credibility had they come down sooner by actually assigning someone to give the public legitimate reasons for them to ban him.
You’re missing the point. If Twitter had a spine and was actually acting in good faith in accordance with their rules they would have issued a ban years ago. They would have done a lot of other things too so this is purely a hypothetical. They waited until after confirmation of the election and strong evidence that the powers that be are now firmly on their side before lifting a finger.
This was happening during BLM endlessly last summer. Verified profiles calling for this kind of action, saying looting is part of the struggle and the right thing to do, etc, etc.
Weirdly Twitter didn't seem to wake up when that was happening.
Does Twitter have enough resources to police all verified profiles? It would seem to me Twitter has an App Store problem when it comes to inconsistent enforcement of rules?
I live in Portland OR a few blocks from where there was a months long siege against federal and police buildings. Yes there was millions of dollars worth of damage done here by looting but thats barely scratching the surface of what happened. The siege of the federal courthouse and central police station involved crazy violent actions on a daily basis, but there was no national outcry to dox and arrest the people responsible for that. People (not "nazis", some not republican/conservative) within blocks of my home have been murdered, beaten, businesses shot up (like the black owned sandwich shop across the street from my apartment because the owner "supported the police") yet there was no deplatforming for the leftist extremists responsible for this. I speak from what I saw right in front of me, what I heard from my living room and bedroom day after day for months, I'm sure there are similar stories from all over the country. Maybe I'm biased by personal experience but it just seems like if angry white kids smash stuff up and say shout some leftist slogans while they're doing it they get a pass but if the angry white kids shout "Trump 2020, something something" while they're doing the same stuff suddenly its sedition and terrorism.
You have got to be kidding. It’s not “suddenly” sedition and terrorism. People went into the Capitol with the stated goal of overturning an election, effectively overthrowing the government. That is sedition!
Seriously, I sympathize with what you’ve gone through. I’m not trying to minimize the damage that was done in downtown Portland, but it’s not even close to the same thing.
I’m pretty sure those rioters were also chanting about overthrowing the government, calling it illegitimate, burning the flag, setting up independent zones trying to secede from the country, literally attacking the seats of power in their local districts and states. The Trump protestors went for a bigger target but their actions were tame in comparison to months of riots, arson, assault and murders.
I think it was a very concerning and unpredictable situation, but describing this group as "violent rioters" while describing the riots over the summer as "mostly peaceful protests" is farcical gaslighting. The potential consequences were more grave here, but the actual conduct itself seems much more orderly.
But I agree that as the Democrats and social media companies still continue to poke and poke and poke already angry people that the consequences can get worse. I wish someone reasonable would try to de-escalate the situation instead of continuing to add gasoline to the fire with further suppression, insults, and contempt for Trump and his supporters--but Silcion Vally and Democratic leadership can't seem to help themselves and would prefer to further insult and alienate the 74 million people who voted for Trump just 2 months ago.
Overturning an election is not effectively overthrowing the government, and it's certainly not sedition.
I also think most people who entered the Capitol building did so because they were just following the people in front of them; not conciously entering to voice their oppinions to the Senate and House.
Not from the US, but when the current president of any nation whips up a crowd of fanatic followers at the end of his term to stay in power against the will of the people that is a coup.
What the reasons are for the individual follower is completely and utterly irrelevant, because it is overshadowed by the fact that the current head of the executive tried to overturn the result of an election.
And quite frankly: the only ingredient missing here was support of the military — if he had that the US very likely could have become a dictatorship right now.
If violently installing someone to power who wasn’t legitimately elected isn’t overthrowing the government in your mind, I have to wonder what qualifies.
The entire premise of the rally was “stop the steal”. Clearly they weren’t all extremely coordinated, but to varying degrees, the people who stormed the Capitol did so with the stated goal of overturning the election. That they were inept of that they failed isn’t evidence to the contrary.
This is my conclusion as well. The standards we hold must hold for everyone.
But it is becoming hard to deny that the standards seem very conditional on whether you agree with the motives and end goal of the people committing violence or not.
I think what happened in the capitol was horrible and hope enough people get to face the consequences in court. Similarly what has happened in Portland and other cities throughout this year has been horrible, from what I can gather and your statement.
I don't think that is the standard at all. Those who represent the voice of others are held to a greater standard.
Plenty of every day citizens can cheat on their significant other and aren't going to lose their job because of it. Any scandal can destroy an individual's career when in a position of authority, judges, chiefs, politicians, etc.
Plenty of every day citizens can go on vacation during the pandemic and be fine. Politicians who do this will have their position revoked (look to Canada for easy examples recently).
There is and always should be a double standard for those who represent the voice of many vs the single individual.
Didn’t thousands of people get arrested for BLM though?
15 people have been arrested for Capitol Hill.
> “Trump 2020, something something”
People can vote for and support Trump and have their opinions, even if they are unpopular. But Capitol Hill is a sacred place and people did breach it. Many of which had neo nazi insignia on their clothes.
If this isn’t an act of extremism, then what is?
On top of that one is the reaction to real, both ongoing and centuries old injustices and the other is quite frankly an attempted coup. Protesting that the other guy won is one thing. Storming the capitol to force your guy in while the votes are counted is a completely different thing.
If you are telling yourself otherwise you might wanna do a reality check. E.g. imagine the whole thing in flipped roles (if you have enough fantasy). Republicans would be completely outraged over all the actions they did in the past 4 years if it was the other team who did them.
I am not from the US and think the whole two party thing is silly anyways, but the shere cognitive distortion going on there hurts. Quite frankly it is below any HN user to uncritically wave a team flag that way, especially when it means you become blind to reality by doing so.
The US Dems would be a center-right party in most european nations and last time I checked we weren't the unfree ("socialist!") doomscape Republicans like to paint it as. In fact I'd rather live under the EU/German laws than under whatever the US system has become and I am not a nationalist by any stretch (I am not even German). Our system just leads to calmer streets, friendlier faces, less fear and stress overall (except for the tax system, I could really strangle the people who came up with that — not for the amount of taxes, but for the complexity of the system).
If presented with lies and reality, choose reality and try to correct for your own biases. Thats what good people do.
The specific people that broke in should be charged with breaking and entering. The people that entered without permission should be charged with trespassing. The people that fought with the police should be charged with assault. I don’t think there’s a case for a terrorism charge.
So if an investigation into George Floyd or Breonna Taylor's deaths found that there was no evidence of wrongdoing, the BLM protestors should just go home?
Racist justice always gets a pass when compared to fascist nonsense based on lies. For the sheer scale of the BLM protests they were overwhelmingly peaceful.
Looting is reasonably acceptable especially in light of genuine BLM grievances with police brutality. This was storming of the capitol with highly malicious intent (pipebombs, zipties, guns) based on utter lies. You’re arguing in bad faith.
I am absolutely not. Looting does nothing to the Police or the authorities and everything to businesses including those who are barely keeping going after the lockdowns.
Twitter gave a platform to those who had taken over six blocks of a city (CHAZ) without a single ban.
Twitter consistently allows all out racism towards white and asian people from verified profiles without a single ban.
Twitter allows the organization of mobs for the left without a single ban.
I disagree, Trump is a fascist and all fascists are criminals. Starving fascism of air is the best way to keep it in check. In most cases racial justice gets a pass especially if it’s a properly warranted as in the US. All this right wing whataboutism to justify a racist and a fascist. You should be ashamed.
Yelling Fire is "Holmes' famous quote comes in the context of a series of early 1919 Supreme Court decisions in which he endorsed government censorship of wartime dissent — dissent that is now clearly protected by subsequent First Amendment authority." [1]
Holmes would later reverse his own ruling yet this quote will never die even though it has no bearing on actual law today and in realty "yelling Fire" would likely be protected speech
Remember "After Holmes' opinions in the Schenck trilogy, the law of the United States was this: you could be convicted and sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act if you criticized the war, or conscription, in a way that "obstructed" conscription, which might mean as little as convincing people to write and march and petition against it. This is the context of the "fire in a theater" quote that people so love to brandish to justify censorship." [1]
That is not a position one should be supporting if they value free Speech
It's Time to Stop Using the 'Fire in a Crowded Theater' Quote [2] Three Generations of a Hackneyed Apologia for Censorship Are Enough [1]
really discouraging to see this come up again and again. every time, someone posts this article and people ignore it to continue arguing in the other subthreads. thanks for posting the correction; I hope eventually we can stop having this conversation here.
The phrase “fire in a packed theater” in the legal context is actually based on a case where someone was jailed for peacefully protesting the draft for WW1 (Schenck v. United States). It has no relation to actual violence, and is in fact a fantastic example of how “harm” by speech can be abused by a malicious government to jail people for what should be protected speech.
It’s no longer good law, thank goodness. Now we have the much narrower Brandenburg test, which requires that speech be likely to cause “imminent lawless action”.
And that grey area is admittedly harder to give context to when the medium for it is text....but since he's the president and he's been physically SAYING falsehoods that lead to this situation, he should have been banned sooner.
“Statements that are false” are an entirely different ballpark of discussion than “statement that incite violence”. Likely, some of the statements that incited these crowds weren’t even false statements at all, but imperative directions (be strong, go to capital) or predictions that turned out to be completely true. (Going to be wild!)
> “Statements that are false” are an entirely different ballpark of discussion than “statement that incite violence”.
No they're not, instead they have a massive overlap. If I lie to my neighbor "Hey, Bob across the street has been stealing your mail", and my neighbor punches Bob in the face, my "statement that was false" led to violence and it can be argued that was my intention the whole time.
The root of all this were the lies he has been spreading to undermine election security and this confidence in the results since long before election day.
As well as the authority of the person spreading it.
The fact that we've decided the President is above libel, slander, and felony charges is a new thing. Thank god people stopped this nonsense when he started advocating terrorism. Equality under the law, implies MORE scrutiny for the powerful. Unfortunately, up until this point we have normalized the opposite.
It seems like most societies have some kind of a reflex towards monarchy. We elect our leaders but still treat them in many ways like monarchs who need to be revered rather than like people we hired to do a job for us.
Falsehoods that lead to this situation.
People who post beheadings on Twitter should be banned.
People who incite violence should be banned.
Nothing was said about U.S. Presidents.
I think it's simpler than this. There will likely be an inquiry, and "enablers" may be held to account. This potentially includes social media platforms such as Twitter.
I thought the term "protected speech" usually means speech that is protected from government censorship by the 1st Amendment. But I'm not sure that has any bearing in this context since government censorship isn't involved here.
Just to clarify (belatedly), my point was that whether or not it's protected speech doesn't matter when we're discussing Twitter - because Twitter isn't beholden to the 1st Amendment. They are free to block speech even if it is "protected."
Michael Sherwin, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, told the Associated Press: "All of those charges [sedition, unauthorized access, theft of federal property] are on the table... We’re not going to keep anything out of our arsenal for potential charges. We will bring the most maximum charges we can based upon the conduct."
https://apnews.com/article/arrests-district-of-columbia-crim...
I think its easier to ban him based on political justification than it would be to ban in in a post-presidency. I also think they are less than interested in enduring his antics as a former president considering how much he abuses the court system to get his way.
The tweet that got him banned literally said go home in love and peace. The perception of him as an adversary and that everything he says has some hidden meaning is the only thing getting him banned by tech companies. This entire blog is trying to out words in his mouth as well.
> Person says bad things to whip up a mob - Twitter unsure to take him seriously or literally.
> Mob actually materializes and several people die - Twitter sure they now have to take him literally
By this logic do we not also have to delete the account of everyone prominent who tweeted anything to the effect of "no justice no peace" with respect to BLM, given that several people died there as well?
In this case you had people with flags bearing a specific person’s name on them. Certainly muting the only person bearing that name will have a direct effect.
The direct effect being that the bulk of the people on the other side of the isle lose the last shred of respect for these institutions, and switch to or create other sites, causing each side to become part of a permanent echo chamber with a mutually irreconcilable set of accepted facts that cause members of the different groups to come into violent disagreement whenever they encounter one another in physical reality.
I thought the goal was supposed to be to do something that reduced the probability of violent conflict?
You’re underestimating the value of immediate, global, and easily accessible coordination. Trump can try to build his own Twitter but it’s nowhere near the trivial proposition you’re making it out to be. Without this coordination mechanism the mob becomes headless and decentralized.
The hardest part about creating your own Twitter is convincing enough people to switch at once to create a critical mass. Transferring the sitting President of the United States and several other prominent members of his party at the same time in a very public way is exactly how you induce that to happen.
That Parler thing was temporarily offline under the load of all the new users. That's not the problem you have when you're having the actual problem of convincing enough people to switch.
That’s one thing that’s hard about it. Scaling and running the service reliably is far from trivial and this tends to be severely underestimated by “let’s just build a competitor” crowd.
> Scaling and running the service reliably is far from trivial and this tends to be severely underestimated by “let’s just build a competitor” crowd.
This is not a trivial problem, but it's also not one that hasn't been solved a hundred times before, and seems to be something they've already handled.
But I also want to put something in juxtaposition here. You have on the one hand the argument that this isn't censorship because they're a private company and you can just make your own. On the other hand, the argument that booting them off is useful because making your own is impractical and they'll fail. If one is true then the other isn't, right?
These two situations couldn’t be more vastly different.
The rally was organized by Trump, the mob that marched on the capital was there for Trump, marching with flags for Trump, encouraged and incited by Trump, and aimed at overthrowing a legitimate election in favor of Trump.
BLM was marching for lost lives that could no longer speak for themselves, organized by and for no single individual, carrying flags to honor the fallen, aimed at creating a future where less people would die unnecessarily at the hands of law enforcement.
Person says SARS-Cov-2 is no big deal or cured with quackmeal, causes deaths, not de-platformed.
I think it's a calculated risk knowing that Biden's win was actually certified so there's now no way this can come back and bite them. I am sure in an alternate universe @PresidentForLife would have been able to tweet indefinitely.
Black Lives Matter is still allowed on Twitter. Dozens of people have died from their protests and riots, not to mention hundreds of businesses vandalized, looted, and set afire. Ditto Antifa. This ban is utterly political, which, depending on how "libertarian" you are, may be fine. But the precedent is not a good one in my opinion.
"While the summer of 2020 experienced 100 days of violence and destruction in cities, according to the the U.S Department of Homeland Security, the most recent CCC study of 7,305 separate events in May and June suggests that 96.3% of events involved no property damage or police injuries and 97.7% of events had no injuries reported. Pressman spoke with UConn Today about the new report."
In contrast, the attack on the capital building was a deliberately violent attack on the seat of our national government. Rioters brought zip ties to potentially hold lawmakers hostage, blunt force weapons, and firearms. It was inherently a violent undertaking with revolutionary aims.
> Considering the sheer number of protests and protesters involved, BLM protests were mostly peaceful.
This is a pretty terrible standard, since MAGA rallies are mostly peaceful as well. The issue is what do we do with the ones that aren't, not how many of them are.
which is sort of silly. the source cited higher up is counting how many separate BLM events involved police injuries and/or property damage. how does it make sense to compare that figure to a single event? with a sample of one, it can only be 100% or 0% by that methodology.
But this wasn't a rally. This was literally them storming the halls of Congress to take back their country from what they believe are corrupt communist deep state agents. Why do they believe that? Because their leader Trump has been amplifying this type of conspiratorial misinformation on Twitter for the past 4 years
The “the percent of protests that are peaceful” largely depends on what you decide to include in that category.
Suppose the peaceful portion of BLM protests didn’t happen, would the violent riots go from being justified to unjust? Why would the presence of the peaceful protests change our moral assessment of the violent ones? Same with the MAGA demonstrations. It should not matter that there were numerous other peaceful MAGA rallies when assessing the storming on the capital.
People brought firearms to BLM events, too. Whether they brought them before or after riots broke out is unknowable. I support BLM and not rioters, fwiw.
What makes this unique is that there are records online of people planning violence in advance.
And that was a small fraction of the people who were there to protest, so they were mostly peaceful as well.
Certainly most of the large BLM protests ended in destruction and violence, at least in my state of Minnesota. There’s a reason the national guard had to be deployed. People find strength in numbers.
That statistical data is pretty bunk. What constitutes an 'event?' It seems that they cast a pretty broad net if they came up with thousands of them. There was a protest in my town with all of 30 people in attendance - does that count? For several nights in a row I tuned in to the news in my state to watch straight up riots in Minneapolis.
It's clear from the pictures of what happened in the capitol that it was done by a tiny fraction of people from the protests, so you don't need any statistical analysis for that.
It usually only takes one to change public perception. And DC was a sample of one. OTOH, BLM has media covering for them(1) to make the group look peaceful.
> the BLM riots were terrorism and equivalent to what happened on Wednesday
One group is rioting to protest frequent ignored murder of their community.
The other riot to attempt to halt an important democratic government process. That's clearly and demonstrably premeditated sedition and treason anyway you spin it, or ignore it in your case.
I read your argument to be that the terrorism is justified in one case and not justified in the other. That may be the case, but many will disagree about which form of terrorism is justified and then you have a bunch of terrorists everywhere.
My argument is that neither terrorism is justified, and both were enflamed by the state of politics and most of the violence/bad behavior was done by desperate criminals or the mentally ill.
You yourself said people were rioting for political purposes. Either rioting for political purposes is terrorism or it isn't, regardless I hope you apply whatever standard you use uniformly and recognize that the riots and Wednesday were both caused by divisive political rhetoric causing ideologically motivated people to think violence is their best option. Introspection is important as is empathy for those you disagree with.
Comparing the Junior Congresswoman to the President of the U.S. does not lend credence to your follow-up statement especially given the ridiculous & slanderous coverage she's been given.
No further discussion with you is warranted.
one-tab.com/page/tE5DJcsOQFiJQtKjGFH8wA
While they hold different offices, AOC is undeniably a favorite of the left and has 12 million twitter followers. Her being a junior congresswoman does not disqualify her from inciting riots. One does not need to be in government at all to incite a riot. The news article I linked was not slanderous afaik and casts AOC's pro-rioting views in a positive light.
It is difficult for me to compare the impact of the BLM riots to Wednesday, but I view both as preventable tragedies caused by politicians. I won't attempt to quantify the tragedy or weigh them against each other.
If you only want to view Trump as culpable, I wish you all the best but I think you would be wrong.
Your tone is extremely patronizing and your message is incorrect. At a minimum, the protests were anti-police. Protestors were chanting slogans extremely hostile to the police. By creating an unsafe atmosphere after months of quarantine lockdowns, people rioted which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage across multiple cities and these deaths. Criminals and people with mental disorders were emboldened by sharp rhetoric/opportunism to break the law. I see this as very similar to what happened this week.
The protests were the largest civil rights movement in US history.
That's several orders of magnatude larger than the largest trump rallys and riots.
Painting BLM as one unified voice of violence is totally dishonest.
Protesting the police is not violent, calling for justice is not violent. The continued, undeniable unaccounted murder of citizens by police is understandable reason for a relatively small portion of the BLM protests to turn ugly, and the police have a major, direct hand in that escalation.
Actually, the protests were anti-police murder. They were protesting the large numbers of murders of Black people by police.
Again, please don't intentionally misconstrue what happened this summer in the BLM movement, or the impetus behind that.
And if you see those protests as "similar" to a fascist mob trying to overthrow the US government, well, I don't really know what to say, other than that you are obviously incorrect.
If the protests did not result in billions of dollars in damage and the deaths we have discussed in this thread, maybe their admirable intentions would have mattered.
But the fact is the riots were absolutely unnecessary and destructive. You can sympathize with the rioters all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that the rhetoric pushed before and during the BLM riots was not one of tolerance and understanding. BLM riots created destructive mobs. If the movement prioritized nonviolent rhetoric this wouldn't have happened.
The suspects have been caught and charged.
Dorn was not a Trump supporter and wasn't killed for political reasons.
Debra White told the paper that her father opposed much of Drumpf's rhetoric and policies, including "the things he said about Colin Kaepernick, the kids locked up in cages, the racist remarks." Dorn's daughters stated their father did not want to support the "law and order agenda".
This is a very strange case. But nevertheless it can't be said if she was killed for that. And the incident was not part of any kind of protest or riot.
"Ramirez said in the Fox59 interview the two groups separated because they realized people in each group were armed. He said both groups then fist-bumped and went their separate ways.
But someone opened fire from a nearby bridge and struck Doty-Whitaker, Ramirez said. He said the shooters then ran away.
Ramirez said he fired back but did not hit anyone.
When contacted by IndyStar, members of Doty-Whitaker's family declined interview requests."
So Obama, Biden, Bush, et. al. should be banned too for all the completely unnecessary wars/drone strikes that killed civilians?? Or is killing civilians sometimes accepted?
This move is entirely political, Twitter should just man up and accept it, instead of insulting our intelligence.
He was banned for inciting violence using Twitter's platform.
I suppose if Trump ordered unlawful drone killings using Twitter, they also may have banned him for that, but Trump used Twitter to control mobs, not drones.
I will take that link at face value, so Trump is just as bad as Obama? Great, they're both loathsome in my book. Count me in. :)
>He was banned for inciting violence using Twitter's platform.
He supposedly incited people with his rally speech. Besides, I don't think the mob was checking Trumps twitter feed for instructions. The violence seemed premeditated to me.
> When all these people were talking about their contingencies, it was always if and when Trump tells us to. The overriding message I was seeing was, "We're here to do a job, we don't know what that job is yet. When Trump said we're going to go to the Capitol, I guess our job is to go to the Capitol." But then they didn't get any further instructions, so there was a moment of, "Okay, now what? Surely this isn't why Trump called us to DC, we don't get it. This was where he was supposed to unveil the evidence, or arrest the plotters, or reveal that China is behind it." And then none of this happened.
Should there be a distinction when the bad things aren't said on Twitter itself? Ignoring the argument that what happened in DC was the culmination of Trump's incitement throughout his presidency, his order to his supporters to march to the Capitol, and claiming he would be marching with them, was _the_ direct call to action. It was given during his in-person speech in DC. Why should Twitter ban him for that?
I think he was banned because Democrats took control of power and FAANG is telegraphing their compliance to those now in charge of how they're going to be regulated. They're going to over-correct, as they're starting to do with banning Michael Flynn and more will follow.
Anyone on YouTube or Twitter that doesn't outright refer to the people who broke into the Capitol as terrorists or insurrectionists are getting demonitized/banned -- literally forced groupthink influenced by who is allowed to monetize their videos. People on the left are trying to extend the culpability of those who broke the law to those who voted for Trump. Implying nearly 70 million people are themselves insurrectionists. I don't think this will be good for the Internet the next time the GOP gets enough seats to pass legislation. I'd be happy knowing that's the worst of what's to come.
A left-wing aligned media business has just taken a serious political action against the sitting president. They didn't even wait for the dust to settle and Trump to leave office. Twitter has not had time to link tweets in the internet world to actions in the real world; there is normally a settling after this sort of event where it turns out that what actually happened was different to the first two weeks of media reporting. When everyone calms down a month after the crisis, this will be looked back on as opening a can of worms that was a horrible mistake.
This protest in the Capitol is a right-wing escalation of a sustained left-wing effort to paint the 2016 election as illegitimate. The US is in trouble if this new thinking takes hold and businesses start exercising their right to discriminate politically. The country will be inoperable.
> sustained left-wing effort to paint the 2016 election as illegitimate
That is such a purposely flawed statement that it is effectively a pure lie even if some of those beats are somewhat true.
Trump has been claiming election fraud since 2016. He claimed he got more votes than Clinton and that three million people voted illegally in California which is why he lost the popular vote.
The only things claimed illegitimate by anyone with any power in the left were either "it isn't fair that the popular vote doesn't matter", "we shouldn't disenfranchise voters as the GOP keeps trying to do in the name of 'election security'" or "certain actors illegally acted around the 2016 election".
There is a world of difference between that last one (the closest to illegitimate) and an actual claim of fraud.
You seem to be forgetting the 3.5 year long wall of propaganda we were inundated with claiming that Donald Trump was a Russian puppet and Russia hacked our election. You had prominent, important elected officials accusing those that disagree with that assessment of "carrying water for Putin", " doing the bidding of a dictator", things like that. You had many of the same people calling for unrest in the streets until Donald Trump is removed from office.
If that isn't a sustained effort to paint the 2016 election as illegitimate I don't know what is.
I'm not saying the election of 2016 was legitimate. I never claimed the investigations and claims were bogus, just that they occurred. I'm responding to a claim that this election is called illegitimate by partisans whereas the previous one was not. Whether either election was legitimate or illegitimate, political opponents of the victors put in great effort to paint them as illegitimate. Both sides are playing this game, and to demonize the one doing it now while forgetting that it has been happening for 4 years already is disingenuous.
Look, I'm sure it is about to become an over-repeated political talking point, but there is a @SpeakerPelosi tweet on the record where she says in May 2017.
"Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts." [0]
Now I'm sure that is an out of context tweet and she probably didn't literally mean "Our elections [were] hijacked", but that would get Trump booted from Twitter.
It isn't a serious argument to say that Trump is bad because his opponents can deduce he means to do secret evil so it is OK to out-of-context quote him or purposefully choose the least charitable interpretation but Pelosi can say that and get the opposite treatment. The current situation is not that unusual for losers of a US presidential elections.
Our election was interfered with my a foreign country. That is not at all the same thing as widespread fraud.
> but that would get Trump booted from Twitter
Trump has called for and praised violence for five years now. He only got banned after fanning the flames during an invasion of the capitol building. (He literally says stay peaceful but not even anything resembling leave until much later in the day)
> It isn't a serious argument to say that Trump is bad because his opponents can deduce he means to do secret evil so it is OK to out-of-context quote him
You don't have to out-of-context quote him.
"We love you. You are all special" while talking directly to those who have invaded the Capitol. That isn't out of context at all. It is exactly what he said and there is no alternative interpretation.
> Pelosi can say that and get the opposite treatment
Do I need to link all of the times where Trump repeatedly said he only lost the popular vote because of fraud. It wasn't a vague statement but a direct one that was repeatedly stated.
> The current situation is not that unusual for losers of a US presidential elections.
No president has waited more than a day to conceded in the modern era. Unless you count Florida where there was odd things going on. Even then it was over once the Supreme Court ruled on it.
Clinton was called out for not conceding the night of the election even though she did first thing in the morning.
These actions are not normal. And I am not even talking about yesterday. Way before that we were way away from normal.
Donald Trump was the one saying the 2016 election had massive voter fraud. He was saying it before, after, and during that election. His words in 2016 and 2017 we're much worse in spreading distrust in the electoral system than any democrat since the Civil War. [0]
You could easily see the same for Democratic gerrymandering and policies that make it easy for people to commit fraud - lack of voter ID being the biggy.
Gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics have quantifiable effects on the outcome of elections. Voter ID requirements have quantifiable effects on the amount of voter fraud that is committed.
Looking at any half-decent estimates of the size of those effects will show that you're drawing a false equivalence. There simply is no quantitative argument in support of voter ID requirements, because the kind of fraud they defend against is already practically non-existent and definitely not prevalent enough to sway the outcome of elections.
Analyzing voter ID as a voter suppression technique shows it easily has more harmful impact on election integrity than its notional benefits of preventing the kind of fraud that doesn't really happen to begin with. And this is why any calls for the institution of voter ID requirements in the US should not be taken at face value.
Your comment would have made a much stronger argument if you hadn't tossed in such an obvious, tired and deeply flawed talking point.
How would we know that the fraud that would be prevented with voter ID is insignificant? It seems we have no real election auditing in our country, which frankly should be something that's done automatically at least on a spot-check basis. One large category of fraud that it would prevent would be illegal immigrant voting. In my state you can register by having someone that is already registered vouch for you. That's it. No other identification needed.
I'd honestly like to know what voter suppression tactics are happening in America. From what I've heard from Europeans they tend to be pretty amazed at how lax our process is.
> How would we know that the fraud that would be prevented with voter ID is insignificant?
The fraud made possible by not requiring voters to show ID is the possibility that someone could impersonate a registered voter and cast their ballot. There are natural limiting factors on how much this form of fraud can be scaled up. Any one person impersonating other registered voters can probably get away with at most casting one ballot per voting location, lest they be recognized as a repeat visitor. Each person voting fraudulently needs to pick a specific registered voter to impersonate at each location, and memorize basic information about this voter (eg. name and address), and physically travel to each voting location. And if any of the marks picked to impersonate end up trying to vote for themselves, the attempted duplicate voter will be detected. So each participant in such a fraud scheme is good for optimistically a dozen fraudulent in-person votes over the course of any one election day, and if committed at scale with a large number of people, the risk of detection quickly becomes very high. The real-world rate of detection of this kind of fraud is extremely low, so we can be confident that this impractical form of fraud is in fact seldom attempted.
> It seems we have no real election auditing in our country, which frankly should be something that's done automatically at least on a spot-check basis.
I don't think this statement is about voter ID.
> One large category of fraud that it would prevent would be illegal immigrant voting. In my state you can register by having someone that is already registered vouch for you. That's it. No other identification needed.
The Voter ID proposals that have been so controversial in the US in recent years (since ~2006) are not about showing ID to register to vote. They're about showing ID on election day, even if you're already legally registered and have been voting without trouble for decades. If you are saying "voter ID" but you mean to talk about tighter controls on the voter registration process rather than on the process of voting on election day, then you should use different terminology rather than using a term that has a different meaning in current common usage.
But aside from that terminology issue: requiring people to show ID when registering to vote ahead of the election is not the only practical way to prevent illegal immigrants from voting. Even if a prospective voter does not show current government issued photo ID when registering to vote, they still have to provide identifying information as part of the registration process. This can be audited before election day.
I still fail to see how requiring a person Show ID on election day is "suppression"
You can not function in modern society with our showing ID at various times, you can no rent a hotel room, a car, cash a check or hell even return merchandise to a store in many cases with out a ID
But you are telling me on of the most important civic responsibilities is suppressed by showing an ID, and ID that is freely available at no cost to all citizens
I'm guessing you've made no attempt to look into the specifics of the legal challenges that have been successfully waged against voter ID laws. In particular, " and ID that is freely available at no cost to all citizens" is something that many states have failed to provide as part of their voter ID laws.
And the context surrounding these laws is relevant, because in many cases the discriminatory intent is plain as day. The assumptions you're making about how universal photo ID requirements are in day to day life fall apart when you consider the specific demographics that have been targeted.
Taken together with the fact that these voter ID laws notionally address a problem that is only barely more than hypothetical, it's impossible to see these laws as anything other than political grandstanding and attempted voter suppression. They are much worse than merely being a solution in search of a problem.
It is possible to present the general idea of voter ID requirements as a harmless, well-intended security measure—as your comment attempts. But even the most cursory investigation into the specifics or history of voter ID in the US reveals that it is not harmless, does not solve a real problem, and is backed by malicious intentions. Which is why any "innocent" attempt to support the idea cannot be taken at face value. That well has been poisoned by an overwhelming volume of disingenuous propaganda.
Of course it is reasonable to suppose that we need to ensure that people are who they say they are but that is a diversion!
It is suppression because showing it on the election day is not the problem, it is getting that ID in the first place. The people who have problems getting that are largely specific categories of people, and the suppression comes via the obstructions which seem to have been purposefully put in place, years before the ID was required, and active opposition to removing them.
This quote, from Anatole France (The Red Lily, published 1894) summarizes it well:
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
PS the things you mention, wrt 'modern society' ? Yeah, those things are also difficult for people who have not got ID and the people who have difficulty getting ID? They simply don't do those things.
>>suppression comes via the obstructions which seem to have been purposefully put in place, years before the ID was required, and active opposition to removing them.
Such as, I would love to see a list of what you consider to be unreasonable obstructions to obtaining an ID. I have a strong feeling we will not agree as to either their unreasonableness or that they are obstructions
>>This quote, from Anatole France (The Red Lily, published 1894) summarizes it well:
So what is your solution, just allow people to steal as long as they are in need?
Sounds like you are advocating for a system not based on individual equality under the law, but a cast system where your position determine how the law treats you, except you would find it "just" if the system punished those you perceived as successful or to use the a more common phrase from authoritarian circles "privileged" and excuse the actions of those deemed to not have said "privilege"
That is not a system I can get behind, I firmly and unequally believe in individual equality
Everyone should be treated the exact same by government no matter their age, race, religion, creed, national origin, sex, orientation, income, or any other characteristic beyond their individual actions
>US is one of the, if not the only, develop democratic nation that allows both Mail in voiting and Voting with out ID
Categorically untrue. As a Canadian living in the UK for nearly 20 years. In both the UK and Canada, I can vote without a ID let alone photo ID.
We bring in our poll cards and they let you vote. Then they cross your name and address off a list so you can't come in to vote again. The polling stations coverage is very good and you can only vote in your designated station, which is usually within walkable distance unless you live on a farm.
We also trialed photo ID for voting here in the UK. It was a massive failure.
I can also get a postal ballot with no problems.
Whatever the problem in the US is, it can be fixed without photo ID.
>>Whatever the problem in the US is, it can be fixed without photo ID.
This is true, Photo ID is not the only way to improve Election Security, but many US states do not have assigned Polling Stations anymore, these open polling stations methods need something more than just poling card, plus there is early voting as well.
Also the UK has other methods of verification done at the time of registration that do not occur in the States, US Voter rolls are infamously insecure, outdated and have all kinds of issues, UK seems to secure their election on registration side instead of the voting site
US does not do either, and any attempt to add security either during registration or on voting day is attributed to racism or classism or some other bigotry
>US does not do either, and any attempt to add security either during registration or on voting day is attributed to racism or classism or some other bigotry
The US already has a registration system. The information just need to be current and the system designed in such a way where a registered person can only vote once (which is not what campaigners are against).
Over here, the local council sends you a letter regularly for you to update your details in the electoral register. If you don't respond then you are not registered to vote in upcoming elections.
They send you a poll card which tell you where to go vote. If you don't have your poll card you can still vote by turning up at the correct polling station. You can't vote at another station.
You have to provide your name and address and they will look you up on the electoral register. If the staff suspect you are fraudulent, they will call the police. After you are provided with a ballot, they cross you name out from the list so that it can't be reused.
There are a small number of cases of error or fraud is very low as you need a lot of information on a large scale over a large area across many polling stations to do meaningful election fraud undetected.
Honestly, UK also has problems with mail voting fraud. It comes up every election. It has not, yet, boiled over into this kind of problem, but clearly, the UK should not be complacent about that. People need a high degree of trust in the system for it to work.
I don't believe any of the electoral fraud claims were actually judged... it's all been rejected for a lack of standing. People saying courts rejected the fraud claims are generally mistaken, because the evidence never got presented.
Not all for lack of standing. The evidence that has been presented for fraud is ordinary and could not have affected the outcome of the election. That's consistent with what every one of the ~3000 county clerks in the U.S. will tell you about every election.
A much bigger issue is election fraud including voter suppression. What has pissed off Republicans this time around, is expansive mail-in balloting as a result of COVID mitigation. It managed to expand the voting pool against their wishes by making it generally easier for people to vote. It's difficult for judges to look at this and go, "ok so your legislative intent is to make it hard for some people to vote, but these are still legally cast votes per the legislature's own legislation, and you just don't like the outcome so you want me to disenfranchise them?" That's a no. A judge isn't going to do that.
>> The evidence that has been presented for fraud is ordinary and could not have affected the outcome of the election.
I feel this is a dangerous cop-out. Some people feel this should be examined[1]. The evidence of actual problems in the election is suppressed by refusal to allow court proceedings and audit. This in turn renders remarks like yours more anecdotal than quantifiable. I'm not saying this is Venezuela, but there does indeed appear there are trout in the milk.
All of what you wrote is bullshit. Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
You are using language to evoke an emotional response to manipulate the reader into feeling that there is a problem, rather than identifying a specific problem in order to mitigate that specific problem. The language you are using is indistinguishable from anti-democratic propaganda.
This is reliable material about the voter fraud myth.
>>Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Technically, mediabiasfactcheck used no actual evidence to dispute the veracity of "here is the evidence", only an assertion of "bias" against the sources. The Brennan Center report only asserts that other claims of evidence are false, not the ones in link I posted. Also it's rife with other tedious rhetorical fallacy. I can't see how you can make the leap without support. In fact, your arguments and the way you present your arguments seem to impeach the honesty of your claim.
(edit, since OP is apparently assuming I am a concern troll because my point was not clear to OP)
Perhaps you have a polite and actually specific refutation to "here is the evidence"? Your comments seem deliberately demeaning and do not appear to have any actual substance.
Were there actually any fraud claims in court? I seem to recall that when actually in court, the attorneys were all very careful to explain that they weren't making any claims of fraud.
That is what uncovering nothing looks like when someone has spent years scrutinising a subject.
Nothing in that turned out to be important enough for left-wing partisans to quote the report. The people bringing up the Muller investigation up first in the conversation tend to be told-you-so rightists; the left by and large would be happy for that debacle to fade into a distant memory.
This report concludes that some politicians don't want to cooperate with politically motivated investigations. The appropriate response to this revelation is shrugs and sniggering.
It was an investigation into whether Trump colluded with the Russians. Even the American Bar Association observed that Mueller found no evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians[0]:
"The special counsel found that Russia did interfere with the election, but “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign."
Obviously "things were uncovered". People were charged. But their charges were obviously not related to Trump-Russia collusion, given Mueller's findings. So why is it that half of the country believes that he did? The answer is so, so obvious.
But hey, maybe you have a better handle on this whole thing than the ABA. I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.
The parent's link provides a fair summary of the report and is more detailed than the ABA statement, which is also fair, just less detailed.
The investigation was about two things; Trump's collusion with Russia AND the obstruction of justice.
The report finds no overt collusion between Trump and the Russians. It details promises of influence to the Ukranians and the Russians by sleazy power brokers like Paul Manafort and Felix Sater, and Trump's associates soliciting Russians and pretty much anyone for Hilary's deleted emails but again, no substantial evidence of direct collusion.
Whether there was obstruction of justice seems like a much more legitimate cause for outrage. https://www.lawfareblog.com/obstruction-justice-mueller-repo... details the numerous ways this was attempted, though full-disclosure Brookings is left-leaning centrist think tank.
The full report is here https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf which you don't need to pass the bar to comprehend, though you do need a lot of free time. I've only read a few parts but it's further confirmed my belief that all politicians (right and left) are completely unscrupulous and must be in order win. "Democracy" is a vague, fungible concept that anyone vying for power will either disregard or interpret in their favor.
I certainly agree that there is some substance to the section on obstruction, but let's take a step back and follow the thread here.
1) OP says Democrats haven't undermined democracy since the civil war.
2). I observe that Democrat leadership actively pushed the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that Trump colluded with the Russians to gain power.
3) I provide evidence that half of the country believes that the President of the United States conspired with Russia to gain power.
The fact that Trump may have obstructed the investigation matters--of course it does. And if he did, he should have been punished for it.
But even if he did attempt to obstruct the investigation, that does not change the basic fact that the Democrats actively undermined our Democratic institutions by convincing the American people, with out evidence, that the President was in cahoots with the Russians.
I have not intended to assert that Trump is as clean as a whistle, or that the Mueller report found nothing at all. (My 'zero evidence' claim above was vague and lazy--it was intended to refer to the question of collusion alone) My intent was to convey that there is no evidence of collusion, and that the fact that the American people were intentionally mislead on this point was the result of a concerted effort by the Democrats to mislead the American people and undermining faith in the President (and, necessarily, the presidency and our republic as a whole.
It is also true that charges were brought due the the Mueller probe, though none led to any charges related to colluding with the Russians to affect the outcome of the Election.
It is also true that Trump may have obstructed the investigation.
All three are true. The fact that folks are refusing to address the first fact by merely observing the second and third facts should indicate how masterfully those other issues--which are related to the Mueller investigation but have no bearing on the question of collusion--have been used to muddy the waters and cover for the Democrats' role in spreading the collusion conspiracy theory, at great cost to the country.
Well I think you've pointed out the core of why political debate often go nowhere. It has a unique way of exposing people's (myself included) fallibility to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.
I agree that Democrats pinned Russian election interference (which did happen) to Trump (which probably did not) in an attempt to undermine his presidency. I also think this is not too far away from the norm. Remember the birther movement? The stolen 2000 elections? How do you rank claims of widespread voter fraud in that list?
However, I'll contend with you on your claim 1). OP did not say "Democrats haven't undermined democracy". He said Trump's undermining of the electoral system was just worse than the Democrats.
No it’s not. Mueller stated “if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so”.
Mueller felt as if his hands were tied in his ability to present evidence to prosecute a sitting President.
And the final Senate report details even more communication than previously believed. But since it came out in August, it really got less media attention than it deserved.
>“if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so”
Say your spouse suspects you of being in contact with your ex, so she hires a private investigator. She is not sure whether you spoke to your ex in person, by phone, or through one of several dozen close confidants with whom you regularly interact. After the investigation, she asks the PI whether he is confident that you did not make contact with your ex.
How could he possibly be? The sheer number of contact interactions makes it impossible to rule out. This is why our criminal justice system operates on the presumption of innocence. For many crimes, it is practically impossible to arrive at "confidence that the [accused] clearly did not commit a crime".
>Mueller felt as if his hands were tied in his ability to present evidence to prosecute a sitting President.
Given that the report stated outright that there was no evidence of collusion, I assume this is in reference to the question of obstruction, which is out of scope.
You need to go back and look at the statement he made. He never says anything to the effect of "you can't prove a negative". Or "we scoured everything and could find no evidence whatsoever, but still doesn't mean that there might have been something he dud".
No, immediately following the statement about "we would have said so", he goes into -- "a current president can not be charged with a federal crime ...". He then goes on to say that he was bound by this property. That's an odd next statement for someone you think is innocent, but just can't prove a negative.
With a new attorney general and Trump about to no longer be an an active President, we may revisit this.
Specifically, the report stated there could be no accusation that any sitting President committed a crime because it would be unfair. Mueller knew the Justice Department would not charge a sitting President, meaning the President would've been effectively denied the right to defend himself in court.
Sadly, Barr took the opportunity to put a different PR spin on the lack of accusation.
> "The president was not exonerated!", which is weasel-speak for "The president was not proven innocent!"
Mueller made it pretty clear he could not exonerate the President, and if he could he would have. Not only were there unanswered questions about Trump's involvement and knowledge of Russia contacts, but the report includes instances of probable obstruction.
There was effectively no Senate trial, because Republicans refused to call witnesses. It was a sham. If Trump was innocent, they would have been happy to call witnesses, but they exercised raw power to make it go away. To me, that constitutes “undermining our democratic institutions”.
You're referring to the impeachment process, the basis for which was a shady phone call during which Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to open an investigation of Joe Biden. That had absolutely nothing to do with the Russian Collusion investigation.
Which is wrong, and given Twitter's stance of issuing corrections for tweets, probably should have made her a ripe target. However, that doesn't excuse Trump's use of terrorism.
> At the White House, Mr. Trump struck a defiant tone, insisting that he would remain a potent force in American politics as aides and allies abandoned him and his post-presidential prospects turned increasingly bleak. Behind closed doors, he made clear that he would not resign and expressed regret about releasing a video on Thursday committing to a peaceful transition of power and condemning the violence at the Capitol that he had egged on a day before [emphasis mine].
Did you actually read the Twitter blog post explaining the ban? They claim Trump
Tweeting that he will not attend the Biden inauguration is “an incitement to violence”. That’s delusional.
Yep, as ‘delusional’ as all the warnings from people who said Trump and his group of psychopaths were going to end up causing a violent attack on democracy... that clearly was an overblown concern, right?
Now I get it, they’re trying to equate the Capitol Hill thing to a revolution. That’s funny, let’s see how far that gets. My bet’s on it falling flat in a few weeks like everything else.
You mean the violent attackers of democracy who stayed inside the velvet ropes and took selfies? https://youtu.be/y9WPuA6EUaw
Seems like there is a comically biased double standard when describing protests and riots.
You keep pouring gasoline on a fire and then keep complaining that it won’t go out. You think impeaching him again and banning him on multiple platforms is going to de-escalate the situation? You know it will do the exact opposite. The Democrats and media companies want to poke and poke and poke until they provoke a reaction. You're delusional if you think you can keep insulting the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump without destabilizing the country. But your brains are so broken by Trump that you can't help yourselves and you're destroying the country because of it. I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, but I understand the rage Trump supporters are probably feeling. And I know who is primarily responsible: it's the same contemptuous out of touch elites that gave us Trump in the first place.
Some of the protest videos show peaceful conduct like this one. Others are extremely unpleasant to watch (NSFL).
I have no doubt that if some of the more radical elements in the crowd had actually gotten hold of someone, things would have gotten a lot more serious.
Fortunately that didn't happen, so thank goodness for that.
Nice that you chose to focus on that and not on the police officer that got killed or the video of another police officer that for almost crushed to death while being repeatedly punched in the face.
One would be forgiven for thinking you are a dishonest hack.
That's why Twitter is such a toxic site. The greatest incentive is to create outrage and agreement or disagreement, and it's on a descending scale from there. "Quality content" is pretty far down the list, and of course the format makes quality content even harder.
It was actually pretty great at content discovery. The content didn't have to fit in a tweet, just a link to the content. Or an announcement. Unfortunately even the great people I used to follow have devolved into politics and it's no longer enjoyable.
I had a similar experience. Twitter was amazing in the early days of Covid for discovering high quality information when following researchers and front line workers. But all my efforts to keep politics out of my feed were futile. All it takes is one person to like one controversial tweet for the flood gates to burst open, and I would be there scrolling away. I just gave up eventually and deleted the app.
I often wonder if it work for some personalities vs others. For lack of better terms, I see the two personalities as community-minded and leadership-minded.
I've got this idea in my head where community-minded are people who like forums, facebook groups, etc. The leadership-minded like thought leaders. This might be a pro athlete, it might be a cutting-edge researcher, it might be the president. You might be a follower of many leaders, or you might be a leader yourself (or both). On Twitter, people can gain celebrity by actual thought leadership, or just applying their "street" popularity to the online world. Or by loudly shouting the most outrageous things you can, for clicks. Think of how people try to be "influencers" on Instagram or YouTube, for the dollars or for the attention.
When I've tried to make Twitter work for me, I've worked to curate my feed with thought leaders (and a few F1 drivers). But I find that I often just don't care about what they have to say except on a very very narrow set of topics. I don't care about celebrity, and the thought leaders don't post often enough about the topic they lead on, for the signal to be worth the noise. And I'm not interested in trying to be a "leader" for leadership's sake, but then, on the rare occasion when you have something to say, your voice is unimportant, because you don't have followers.
I've always been somewhat allergic to celebrity, and I'm not saying people who find value from Twitter are celebrity-seekers, but it does feel like the mindset is orthogonal to mine, and the value I derive from social networks, I have a very hard time deriving from Twitter.
That's valid, but if the platform doesn't make it a two-way street by providing easy ways for more people to discover me and my posts, I'm just not that interested in it.
I have things to say and share as well, and the product needs to tend to that in order to have me be interested in staying on as a user.
There are other platforms where I can follow AND be heard. HN is one of them. I've shared several projects that got to the front page. Whenever I post projects to Twitter, even put a shitton of hashtags on it, and all I get is dead silence for my 50+ hours of work put into something honestly interesting, while some "influencer" gets 100K likes and 10K follows for their one-line low-effort armchair tweet bashing Elon Musk that they spend 10 seconds on. That discourages me from wasting more time logging into Twitter.
That's just my experience as a user. If they want more people like me on there, they need to fix their product to improve discoverability of small creators. If they don't, that's fine, I don't really need Twitter anyway.
It would make the implementation of back doors and moderation/suppression of speech much easier, so that’s a plus too. Full sarcasm of course, but if those aspects could be managed, I’d be all in.
People are so afraid of such silly things sometimes, like those people afraid of a U.S. government run twitter.
Who has more freedom to express their opinions a normal person at work whose boss can fire them for any reason, or a government worker who has legal guarantees for their speech?
Who is less likely to start a war by banning a dangerous world leader from a platform, Twitter, or an independent non-profit entity run by the state.
Section 230 specifically does not apply to federal criminal liability and the circuits are currently (sort of) split about whether a platform could be held responsible in this situation.
The 9th Circuit ruled Sec. 230 did not shield a platform from civil liability arising from their “failure to warn” a potential victim of a violent crime. Meanwhile, the 2nd Circuit found Sec. 230 did protect Facebook from civil liability for hosting terrorism-related content.
And both of those were civil cases. In the context of potential criminal liability Sec. 230 couldn’t even be raised.
Every for-profit media company makes content decisions based on revenue. OANN, Newsmax, Breitbart, AM talk radio, etc. aren’t shielded by Section 230 at all and they have been some of the strongest amplifiers of conspiracy theories and misinformation. Suggesting that the problem of right-wing extremism is going to be solved just by repealing Section 230 is crazy.
In addition to this very good point, I'd also add that consistent, even, quality moderation of platforms with as many users as Twitter is not possible.
Even trying to do moderation at that scale just results in thousands and thousands of workers with psychological issues, from how damaging the work is.
"Just" solved? No. But your point makes it clear why Section 230 is not important to protect the Internet: Other businesses host speech without it just fine. Big Tech should not get a special get out of jail free card.
I’ve just read the other HN post about Section 230 so I’m obviously an expert: Section 230 is incredibly important in protecting the internet. It’s why no one can sue HN for what you and I write here, and even why no one can sue _you_ for something you didn’t write yourself but happened to quote in your comment. Without it companies would be sued all the time: it’s a hostile world out there for businesses. You could still win on the basis of the 1st amendment alone most of the time, but that’s often a long, convoluted, and expensive argument to make. The point of 230 is to dismiss those frivolous lawsuits immediately.
> But your point makes it clear why Section 230 is not important to protect the Internet
I’ve only given evidence that businesses not privy to the Section 230 liability shield are doing exactly the same thing that you claim would be prevented by repealing Section 230, and therefore repeal will not solve the problem.
It is a fallacy to extend this to say that Section 230 is not important to protect the internet in general, as the internet is about far more than companies putting profit over public safety. The absence of the liability shield will absolutely cause other chilling effects. See my reply to a sibling reply for more detail, with evidence to support this position.[0]
> Section 230 is not important to protect the Internet: Other businesses host speech without it just fine
It's important if you want scalable P2P platforms; the offline businesses you are talking about have pre-distribution human editorial review of all content, which effects scale and focus and permits essentially only top-down communication.
It's time we stop treating scale as an inherent good or an excuse for bad behavior. If you can't scale without major societal harm, you shouldn't scale.
No, but if someone is going to make a claim that repealing Section 230 will solve a given problem, they’d better actually have some reasonable evidence that it will solve that problem, and not just cause a massive amount of collateral damage.
FOSTA-SESTA punched a relatively small hole in the Section 230 liability shield using the pretext that web sites facilitating sex trafficking (read: Backpage) couldn’t be prosecuted otherwise. That was a lie; Backpage was eventually successfully prosecuted using legal tools which had previously existed[0]. The thing that legislators claimed they were trying to solve—sex trafficking—remains woefully unaddressed, but the collateral damage was significant and disproportionately affected marginalised groups and small web site operators (and may have actually made the sex trafficking problem worse)[1].
Claims that Section 230 need to be repealed to “take away power from Big Tech” or to “stop extremism” are just wrong.
A blanket repeal of Section 230 will only concentrate power even more with Big Tech since they’re the only entities with enough money and power to accept liability for every shitposting troll on the web. (Again, FOSTA-SESTA already illustrated this: the big dating services continued to operate, while niche/hobbyist sites—and subsections of sites like Craigslist where dating was not their primary focus—shuttered.)
A blanket repeal of Section 230 will not stop extremism since there are multiple other non-internet sources peddling misinformation.
Section 230 is not the cause of these problems any more than paved roads are the cause of deaths from high speed car crashes. Few people would seriously argue that we should go back to driving only on dirt roads, but it feels like that’s where so many people are with this subject, and it’s really taking the focus away from why extremism exists in the first place and what we need to do to tackle that root problem.
He told people to march on the Capitol and stop the steal. If a mob boss tells his lackeys to "take care of it", he is guilty of murder when they kill him. Judgement cones into play because people are not robots, and people in authority have a responsibility to make their orders clear.
Mob boss: no I meant for them to take him out for a spa day, not kill him!
Trump is usually careful to talk like a mob boss. He never explicitly asks for things. He implies, leaving enough gap for plausible deniability. But to this mob he was very clear - come to DC on the 6th, go to the Capitol, target Republican lawmakers who were “weak”, ie, not currently stopping the steal.
Fuck Trump and fuck everyone in this thread trying to pretend like the mob never got any directions from him.
The classic example is Charles Manson; he didn't kill anyone but he made it happen. Trump's case is certainly a little more abstract because he's smart enough to use ambiguous language.. But it really doesn't strain the imagination to understand how the principle is similar
Normally, the President of the United States speaks in a way that is unambiguous with regard to whether they intend people to commit an illegal action.
Previously theoretic risks are now manifest, demonstrated, and cognizable.
Actual riots, insurrection, disruption of government, assaults on law enforcement, damage to government buildings, theft of government property, violence, and deaths, have occurred.
The instigator is unrepentent and non-credible in what are at best tepid disavowals.
The totality of context has changed. If "he has tweeted worse things in the past", the undeniable impact is abundantly clear.
The ban is absolutely warranted. If anything, it is many years too late.
Twitter specifically address these points:
Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks. After assessing the language in these Tweets against our Glorification of Violence policy, we have determined that these Tweets are in violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy and the user @realDonaldTrump should be immediately permanently suspended from the service.
I agree with the action and disagree with their justification.
Because of the weakness of their justification, this could be further gasoline on the fire for his 74 million supporters. I frequently find myself having to argue with said supporters, and I can't argue that this justification makes sense other than to say... well they should have banned him before hand.
It feels like they were looking for almost anything remotely shitty that Trump said to ban him. More specifically, they are looking for a reason to ban him based on saying anything not in support of the next administration, because of his supporters storming the capital. I can see the chain of logic here, I just think it's a little weak and being selectively enforced.
Tell the trump supporters you know that this is about imminent threat. trump's words just started a historic riot, and it looks like he may say more things that spark unrest in the immediate future. This isn't about both sides or BLM. He just, two days ago, caused insurrection. It would be negligent to just watch him do it again
Calling everyone who voted for Trump a supporter isn’t accurate. I know people who strongly dislike him and voted for him over Biden. As a lower bound you can estimate around 8% of voters will donate to each campaign which clearly marks them as supporters. Perhaps as many as 40% of those 74 million votes come from strong supporters who might not donate but will advocate for him among friends and family etc.
However, mostly it’s based on party affiliation where people voting against him in a primary would vote for him in a general election.
There are 3 options vote for A, vote for B, or abstain in one way or another.
When you have such a limited number of options their isn’t an obvious reason for the choice. Both loving A or hating B more than you hate A can result in an A vote. With millions of voters some people are going to vote based on silly crap like a candidates name being similar to someone they know, or a coin flip. Hell, you can expect at least a few mistakes.
PS: 1,865,620 people voted libertarian, presumably a few felt the way you do but when you know someone isn’t getting elected that opens up even more options.
If a person were so concerned about not being a Trump supported, like you mentioned they could have abstained or voted for some other person that's not Trump. At the end, voting for Trump is support for Trump no matter what convoluted logic was used to arrive at that decision.
To kind of latch onto what you said, I'd say that there is 60% of those 74 million who would have benefited from a Twitter ban which was well justified. They are more on the fence and can be persuaded by the tides of big business and what seems like an over reaction on their part. The 40% are probably hopelessly convinced of anything that Republicans say.
I’m a Trump supporter who voted for him twice. I condemn what happened in the capital as well as the BLM riots that burned down businesses. I’m okay with both sides being met with gas and rubber bullets. All of trumps supporters aren’t lunatics. I would say the people who stormed the capital are maybe 10% of his support in the type of person who would attack someone over politics.
Trump called for this gathering to happen, and when it got way out of control, and then became an invasion of the capitol, he did absolutely nothing effective to stop it. He watched the whole thing unfold on live TV, with innumerable ways to communicate with that crowd, and he did nothing except tell them “be less violent, and I love you”.
So if you are still a “Trump supporter” at this point, I really don’t see how you can also say you “condemn what happened in the capitol”. Because Trump didn’t.
Hmmm I guess I would be better to say I’m a conservative libertarian who voted for trump twice. I’m happy to see the back of Trump and as his presidency progressed I realized he nor the gop align with my views. I really see how fake both sides are and have become jaded with politics.
I’ve told all of my maga friends Trump is a clown all along. But again the left really didn’t have any issues with riots this summer and now everyone’s clutching their pearls.
Don't you think that one of the most important changes in recent weeks is that he's now a lame duck, he doesn't really have power anymore. This is why he's been losing more an more allies since election day. Powerful figures and institutions can change their stance now and this is a preemption of his exit when the next president takes over.
I'm basically saying, it's a whole lot easier to be "brave" and deal a blow to a lame duck than a live tiger.
> Actual riots, insurrection, disruption of government, assaults on law enforcement, damage to government buildings, theft of government property, violence, and deaths, have occurred.
This describes the past half-year in Portland, Seattle, and more sporadically in many other cities.
I believe that no accounts on the Left: organizing, not merely advocating - have been permanently shut down.
So, I'm very skeptical that anything legitimate has changed. It feels very political.
This. There are groups like Rose City Antifa in Portland or EDM (Every Day March) in Seattle that regularly engage in widespread violence, disruption, and illegal behavior. They organize and advertise and evangelize their events on all the typical social media platforms. They haven’t been given even a warning, let alone a ban. And yes, people have died due to these groups’ actions.
The environment has changed, most significantly in that Trump is no longer going to be in control of the DoJ in a few weeks. This isn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back, this is the last straw before the straw dispenser was relieved of power and no one had to accept straw from them anymore.
I think you're right, that this is actually a simple calculus about power and money (as it always has been and always will be). It's really the thing that grinds my gears when I forget myself: The duplicity and virtue signaling. The ad economy having brought back yellow journalism and endless emotional pleas. The internet being used in massive propaganda campaigns and allowing children and non-citizens a voice in forums that people perceive as our civic spaces -- even though they aren't -- because it is actually impossible to "moderate" the massive social media platforms (despite their promises). I like to think that I'm up on classical Stoic philosophy, but I still struggle sometimes to divorce myself from the fervor. It's so human.
My guess is that we are quickly approaching a point in time when culture will start to swing the other way, and the internet will become this thing that people don't take seriously, haha much like it was in the 90s. That, and some combination of that and censorship. And the tech monopolies absolutely will not survive the level of influence they have now, even if they think they are playing it safe by supporting a particular political faction which happens to be popular at the moment. I think things are going to change fairly rapidly in this direction because it turns out being connected constantly is actually pretty awful in most of the ways that count. Thankfully, however, it seems most folks understand this in a kind of unspoken, visceral way. The same sort of "self-policing" feeling you get when you've wasted 12 hours straight playing Skyrim. It just feels dirty.
> And the tech monopolies absolutely will not survive the level of influence they have now, even if they think they are playing it safe by supporting a particular political faction which happens to be popular at the moment.
I hope you’re right but I have my doubts. Currently I see the left waging total war when it comes to censorship and control of allowed/disallowed speech. Their consolidation of power and influence (and their attack on foundations like free speech principles) has been rapid, and pervasive. When I look at the left trying to inject things like the factually incorrect “1619 Project” into schools, I see them trying to make their temporary power gains permanent by propagandizing, so that there is no avenue by which different thought can enter the Overton window.
Maybe I’m being overly cynical but I don’t see a way back from this. I foresee an increasing amount of leftist authoritarianism as the future of the US, because there won’t be a balancing politic on the other side to moderate us.
I agree with you on the surface, but in reading your comment, I'm reminded of feeling exactly the same way after Trump was elected, just in the opposite sense. And thinking about it, this was the same sense I had about things after Obama and even way back with Dubya. The internet really is a communications revolution. I keep saying that we are under assault, our attention spans attrited by the manufacturers of mass media products for clicks (and by our friends and neighbors who are engaging in this kind of feedback loop), and as I mentioned in another comment, it's difficult to separate myself from it and view it objectively. But in talking with you here and others elsewhere, it's clear to me that this is a pervasive issue across time, and I feel strongly that the internet as it exists today and the culture we have as a result simply can't continue. Whether that means that some sort of regulation which turns social media into television controlled by a few select entities, or culture shifting and people lose trust in the information they see online, I can't say, but this level of mass media sensationalism is clearly unsustainable politically. The most powerful political factions have built and maintained their power on the basis of appearing stable to their supporters, and Twitter has (perhaps unknowingly or shortsightedly) sent a message loud and clear to every political faction on the planet. Anybody with real power has every incentive to destroy that kind of political influence. I'd pay a lot of money to watch a documentary on Twitter's reasoning through this decision.
>I think it will have some negative 2nd/3rd order effects. that they haven't yet realized.
This is correct. The type of person that stormed the capitol will perceive this as an escalation. I’m sure that’s not what we need, but I’m also sure that there is no good way out of this mess.
> The type of person that stormed the capitol will perceive this as an escalation.
One can argue that this type of person would potentially perceive any action (or inaction) as an escalation. That doesn't mean that action shouldn't be taken.
Look at the utterly insane mental gymnastics you're engaging in. "People are angry at constantly being treated with contempt and having their elected representative smeared. Let's impeach him again, call all his supporters terrorists, and ban them from communicating!" People like you and the Democrats seem desperate to cause more violence instead of de-escalating the situation with a peaceful, dignified exit. It's a shame that you care more about "owning Trump" one more time rather than promoting peace, but I'm not surprised.
You've been using HN primarily for political battle, which we ban accounts for, regardless of which politics they're battling. We have to, because doing that destroys the curious conversation HN is supposed to exist for (see [1] for more explanation).
You've also been breaking the site guidelines egregiously and often, such as with personal attacks and name-calling. That's seriously not allowed here.
Therefore I've banned the account. 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. The rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> The type of person that stormed the capitol will perceive this as an escalation. I’m sure that’s not what we need, but I’m also sure that there is no good way out of this mess.
I actually think that the reason we are in this mess is because there have been zero consequences for terrible behavior, so far.
Of all the terrible things Trump has done, it has taken inciting a riot, an attempted overthrow of our democratically elected government, for him to loose his megaphone. Why was incarcerating children at the border not enough? Or encouraging those "fine people" in Charlottesville who murdered a woman? Or one of the many other instances of him spewing hate?
We need more accountability. Actions have consequences, and it is long overdue that those people who take irresponsible, harmful actions, either out of desire for personal gain or sheer idiocy, start feeling the consequences.
The right is supposedly the side to which "law and order" appeals. Trump and his people are exactly the kind of people who need to know that they will get punished to the full extent of the law when they misbehave. That's the only thing that will keep them in line.
Because it's not like they have a moral compass to fall back on.
You've posted nothing but political and ideological battle comments to HN for a year. We ban accounts that do that, because (a) it's not what HN is for, and (b) it destroys what HN is for.
See https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for more explanation about how and why we ban this sort of account.
Obviously plenty of other people are currently posting abusively in these huge political flamewar threads—but most of them are not using HN primarily for that purpose. We ban the ones that are.
I've banned this account. 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.
However, there's no evidence that the election was crooked - the courts think so too. In addition, the President's moral compass seems to be pointing towards strong arming election officials to provide him the exact number of votes (11,780) that he needs to overturn Georgia, pardoning his former friends and allies and convicted war criminals. And this is just within the last couple of weeks.
> no evidence that the election was crooked - the courts think so too
Haven't all of the cases been thrown out for lack of standing thus far? Doesn't that mean the evidence hasn't even been heard? How can the "courts think so too" if they haven't heard evidence?
Also, it's offensive when people say the election wasn't crooked to people that witnessed its crookedness firsthand. I am one of the many people whose ballot went uncounted.
> Also, it's offensive when people say the election wasn't crooked to people that witnessed its crookedness firsthand. I am one of the many people whose ballot went uncounted.
The problem is there's evidence should you choose to see it, constitutional unlawfulness & just cause on an unprecedented scale to at least demand a thorough discovery stage in the courts, which never happened.
The way to kill the fraud narrative is by debating those raising the charge, actually hearing the cases in court instead of tossing them on procedural grounds and allowing full audits, signature matches in Fulton for example.
If you listen to the full phone call from which the carefully picked snippet you refer to was lifted Trumps moral compass seems far better than the shifty and obstructionist Georgia Secretary of State to me - Raffensberger has no explanation for simple charges and whimpers when reminded of the requests he has been actively ignoring [1].
It does not exactly scream "innocent" to anyone with half a conscience. Nor did the threatening and doxxing of children that occured during the certification of the Michigan electors.
"The problem is there's evidence should you choose to see it, constitutional unlawfulness & just cause on an unprecedented scale"
Maybe you would want to provide examples of these then?
"The way to kill the fraud narrative is by debating those raising the charge"
I am actually not quite sure that debating the issue will kill the narrative but that's just my opinion.
"actually hearing the cases in court instead of tossing them on procedural grounds"
Frankly I have no comments here. What real evidence of fraud is there?
"Trumps moral compass seems far better than the shifty and obstructionist Georgia Secretary of State"
I never commented on the Georgia Secretary of State's conduct and frankly, that's not under review. If the President had just asked for the review of votes, that would be fine. Instead, we received the exact number of votes that he needed, statements to the tunes of: 'Fellas, what are we gonna do here? I only need 11,000 votes' and to do 'the review with people who want to find solutions but not with those who do not want solutions' or something to that effect. Claiming that someone stuffed ballot boxes does not constitute evidence.
Furthermore, this does not change my comments about the pardons either but that's not really the point under discussion.
Would you care to be more specific about what you think is factually incorrect about that comment, or are you just glibly trying to borrow a phrase that is more commonly (and more accurately) used these days against Trump and his supporters?
It certainly seems to me that Trump and many of his most high-profile supporters have been remarkably free from serious consequences despite behavior that has been scandalous to an unprecedented degree. Going by the political and societal norms of just a few decades ago, Trump's political career should have been dead and buried dozens of times over.
The "kids in cages" and "very fine people" nonsense continues to get peddled despite not being rooted in reality. And lets not forget, Trump told everyone to drink bleach to treat COVID-19!
You seem to be complaining about some stuff that's not actually mentioned in the comment at issue. That's not a great way to back up that "divorced from reality" assertion. And for the stuff that does appear to be at least somewhat relevant to the comment at issue, you haven't clarified anything about what you believe to be divorced from reality, merely asserted that it is all "nonsense".
The comment at issue did not use the phrase "kids in cages". That's you adding your personal color to a subject that you seem to object to being brought up in any manner at all. It looks like you're trying to build a straw-man or three, rather than justify the accusation that the comment in question is "entirely divorced from reality".
More specifically, it gets the order of events wrong. Trump's comments about "very fine people" came after the deadly white supremacist rally, so it's misleading to imply that those comments were in encouragement of the killing.
However, it's perfectly valid to construe Trump's comments as praise after the fact for the white supremacist rally, even though he specifically condemned the killing that resulted. Because Trump's assertions that there were "very fine people" on both sides and that there were many people on the alt-right side of that event who were not neo-Nazis or white nationalists are simply not credible claims. Trump was praising somebody. Even praising or encouraging the kind of white supremacists who don't get violent is abhorrent conduct on the part of the president, but the comment upthread exaggerated beyond this.
Right. Trump said that, but that doesn't actually change the fact that that there was no reason for anybody to be showing up to support the alt-right side of that event unless they were in fact a neo-Nazi or white nationalist. Pretending that there was a significant faction of those torch wielders who somehow weren't white supremacists is just silly. But Trump definitely didn't intend to praise the empty set with his "very fine people" comment.
On the one hand it looks bad for the incoming party to immediately replace the palace security and start issuing arrest warrants for opposition leaders, but on the other hand it may need to be done in order to run a government that isn't under physical siege on a regular basis.
The people that stormed the capital have been pretty clear about their position here: they plan to continue escalating unless Trump is installed into power for a second term. There's nothing we can do to meet people who think like that halfway; the only course of action which might avert further tragedies is to convince them that they aren't very powerful and won't be able to achieve their goals.
Severe enough "symptoms" can turn into comorbidities and are diseases unto themselves. Sometimes worse that the initial disease. If you get a rash from poison ivy, itching is a symptom. If you scratch all your flesh off because it itches and you're a stubborn idiot that won't go get treatment from a doctor, and then that exposed flesh gets a nasty infection that eats your limb, well then the symptom has now advanced into a disease worse than the initial cause.
Let's say in this metaphor the doctor stands for maybe seeking therapy for paranoia and oppositional defiant disorder, or something like that. These people are not without agency in their own radicalization, though we could argue that society really doesn't help matters when it comes to mental health or pernicious algorithms that send people down conspiracy holes.
I see it as a symptom, but the underlying problems are complex and can't be resolved over the next 2 weeks. So we need a stopgap solution to prevent the violent attack many of them have promised for the Inauguration.
the stopgap was the supreme court and they've chosen to be derelict in their duties. these people just want their case to be heard. in absence of doing so, the narrative around the election is being entirely defined to them by lin wood. this situation is a chinese fingertrap, force will only make it worse.
The people you're hearing this from just aren't being honest with you. Their case was heard dozens of times in courts across all the disputed states. The idea that the Supreme Court specifically needs to weigh in was created only after those losses, as a deliberately impossible standard to keep people mad; everyone familiar with the legal system was saying from the start that the Supreme Court wouldn't rule on the merits of this case.
>Was a survey performed as people were entering the grounds?
No. But an inventory of some of those who left the grounds in handcuffs was performed. And various types of weapons, police-style zip ties and molotov cocktails were found.
Dozens were injured, five people are dead, one of them beaten to death.
Offices were trashed, items stolen and the seat of our government was vandalized.
You don't need a crystal ball to draw conclusions from that.
You need a crystal ball to draw correct conclusions about the future though. What's happening in threads like this is that people have completely lost control of their minds. I estimate that 90%+ of comments are people mistaking their imagination for reality - reality is mostly unknown, but you'd never know it from the way people talk.
It's almost as if people have been hypnotized or something. No one has the slightest concern for what is actually true. I hope it's only people on internet forums that are like this.
>You need a crystal ball to draw correct conclusions about the future though.
I don't know about that.
I'll prognosticate that the close compatriots of the violent insurrectionists who are currently enjoying three hots and a cot courtesy of the US Government will almost certainly engage in more violent acts. Probably fairly soon.
History is generally a pretty good guide to the future.
Will every single person who smashed windows, beat on people with pipes and bats and went looking for Congresscritters to take hostage show up at the inauguration with RPGs to kill as many people as they can? I don't know.
I can't say for sure, but since they've already shown themselves to be angry, violent and willing to harm/kill others, it's a pretty good bet that a significant number of those people will attempt violent action against their perceived enemies in the future.
>I'll prognosticate that the close compatriots of the violent insurrectionists who are currently enjoying three hots and a cot courtesy of the US Government will almost certainly engage in more violent acts. Probably fairly soon.
I hear most people on the left support reforming criminals, and finding underlying root-causes. Do you?
>I hear most people on the left support reforming criminals, and finding underlying root-causes. Do you?
I do, for root-causes such as poverty, lack of economic opportunity, lack of education, being victims of racist policies, etc... sure, reform is possible.
When the root causes are massive delusion, indulging in ridiculous conspiracy theories, general resentment that other people want to be treated fairly, cult-of-personality-like worship of a dictator, etc. Then unfortunately the root-cause is ignorance and the problem is unfixable.
>When the root causes are massive delusion, indulging in ridiculous conspiracy theories, general resentment that other people want to be treated fairly, cult-of-personality-like worship of a dictator, etc. Then unfortunately the root-cause is ignorance and the problem is unfixable.
And how do you know all this? You're pretty quick at finding root causes.
>However people seem reluctant to grant this to Trump supporters. They seem to be always lumped together as evil racists.
I find it more than a little ironic that you choose to paint others with a very broad brush while making the claim that those people paint others with a broad brush.
Personally, I try to treat others based on their individual actions. Perhaps you should try it sometime.
Your statements are fairly reasonable, and you have awareness of when you are speculating. If more people were like this, perhaps this tailspin could be averted. But look through threads like this and judge for yourself how many people are as reasonable as you.
Do you need a crystal ball to draw such confident conclusions about how other people think? It seems pretty unlikely that everyone who disagrees with you does so because they've lost control of their minds and don't care about the truth.
Then when I mention the notion of the truth, why is it received with hostility, and downvoted, universally?
Here, I'll give you a chance to see if you care about the truth:
SpicyLemonZest says:
> The people that stormed the capital have been pretty clear about their position here: they plan to continue escalating unless Trump is installed into power for a second term.
Can you come up with a plausible explanation for how this can be known?
> There's nothing we can do to meet people who think like that halfway; the only course of action which might avert further tragedies is to convince them that they aren't very powerful and won't be able to achieve their goals.
Can you come up with a plausible explanation for how this can be known?
There was a survey! Many news reporters were on site, interviewing people who entered the grounds. They talked about how they were taking the government back, how they'd like to get their hands on Congressional leaders, and how they'd be back with rifles on January 20th if Congress didn't do the right thing. Without random sampling, there's no easy way to know if it was 20% or 80% of the insurrectionaries thinking that way, but even 20% of such a big crowd leaves enough people to do some serious damage 2 weeks from now.
Is there any specific reason to believe the media accounts are false, or just a general principle? I feel like this is starting to approach the level of skepticism where it's impossible to be convinced of anything.
Who said they were false? Click bait is rarely false just misleading.
My local news runs a promo every night that they have some super important message that you need to hear "what you could be doing wrong with kids". When they finally share it's something like 'yoga is good for your health'.
Journalism is a business. All news orgs are judged by selling papers to driving clicks.
Seeing a few people saying something means a few people said something. Assuming it applies to all and skepticism sets in.
Some people may follow through with that, or they may not.
The media tells stories, social media tells stories, our friends and family tell stories, and our own mind tells stories. But they are just stories. Some of them will surely come true, some of them will not.
It feels like you know, just as it feels to the people at this riot like they know - it is the very same underlying phenomenon: human consciousness, with its ability to see into the future, to read the minds of millions of people, to know the fine details of what happened at an event even though no one who was actually there may have witnessed it with clarity. It is the most powerful device on the planet, but if it isn't kept under control: watch out (as we saw at the Capitol).
The biggest reason for the timing IMO is the Senate races in Georgia. Now that Dems are in control of all chambers and Biden's appointments (to FCC and others) can go through, net neutrality is safe and section 230 is no longer in danger of being repealed, so Twitter will not face any consequences for the ban.
> President-elect Joe Biden has said that he wants to revoke Section 230. When Biden was vice president under Obama, the administration was largely hands-off when it came to the tech industry.
> Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden told The New York Times editorial board that tech’s legal shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act should be revoked.
> Democrats, including President-elect Joe Biden, urged Congress to revise Section 230 to force tech companies to remove hate speech and extremism, election interference and falsehoods. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called Section 230 a gift to Big Tech. "It is not out of the question that that could be removed," she said in 2019.
As an outsider, the situation is quite amusing to see. One side wants to revoke 230 so that the tech companies would stop policing content. Another side wants to revoke it so that the companies would police more content instead.
The Republican position on this has always been idiotic. Revoking 230 would make platforms directly liable for what is written on them, making them crack down more on their posts.
Well, at least in that case things would have to be legally equal right? Twitter would be required to also ban the thousands of Antifa and far-left violent groups that have ravaged cities and local businesses all summer. No more double standards.
While it would be nice if this were the result, why do you imagine that Twitter would ban these accounts promoting violence when members of the American government and major media outlets openly signal boost and support the very same violence? It is clear that one faction's promotion of violence is considered acceptable while the other faction's promotion of violence is not.
While I agree that the woke corps certainly promote and endorse these groups, I still have a small amount of faith in the US legal system to seek justice. Meaning if Twitter failed to maintain their legal obligation to enforce, they'd be open to litigation.
The Republican position isn't so idiotic when you consider that a consequence would be that (supposedly Democrat-supporting) Big Tech companies would be unable to provide platforms for the free spreading of ideas, reducing their attention and revenue, and making it harder for citizens to organize and hold their government to account.
It makes even more sense when you consider that the second-order effect would be that people migrate their discussions to sites operated from countries outside the US, which have their own political agendas. Perhaps you can think of a country that has advanced cyber capabilities, strong control over local platforms, and resentment of US global influence.
This MO of triggering national self-destruction becomes more obvious the more examples you see, such as the spreading of misinformation about 5G or vaccines/masks, in order to radicalize citizens into destroying their own communications infrastructure and overwhelm their health services.
I get the sense the Republican position is often stated in oversimplified terms. Reading some of Trump's comments, it seems like what he's been pushing for isn't so much revoking 230 entirely, but rather mandating that you only get to keep section 230 protections if content moderation is applied "neutrally" (which in his mind means right-leaning content isn't moderated as heavily anymore).
The problem with this, IMHO, in today's polarized world is who judges whether moderation is balanced? Whichever party currently runs the executive branch? A commission whose members are squabbled over like the SCOTUS? Etc. Similar to trying to bring back the FCC "fairness doctrine," it feels unrealistic at best... or a backslide into government censorship at worst.
> This ban seems to heavily take advantage of the current moment, as it's obvious that he has tweeted worse things in the past.
I don't blame them. Would you rather ban a vindictive US president or an outgoing, lame duck US president in his final days of office? Besides, regardless of how you feel about him, he's one of the main reasons Twitter is still relevant today. If they banned him sooner, they would have lost a ton of traffic.
To be clear, I am not for or against Twitter. I'm just making sense of their rationale.
The news media reliably produces these “something must be done” stories that the powerful can then use as cover for actions they normally wouldn’t dare to take. And all at the same time - no coordination necessary, no central agenda, just an understanding that for some short period, all sorts of questionable actions will be excusable. A sort of Schelling point for anti-societal behaviour.
Ironically, I was worried about it before, but not now. Now that the Capitol Hill event has happened, the security effort will undoubtedly be multiplied multiple times over.
Twitter rules are so broad and states so vaguely, that half of the Twitter users technically violated them numerous time, and Twitter applies these rules selectively.
Trump was democratically elected (by commoners). Twitter was built with wealthy private investor money. The fact that Twitter banned many of the commoners who elected Trump, but couldn't ban Trump himself until now due to the fear of public backlash is a testament to how anti-democratic it is to have private control over the national means of communication.
Twitter is not "your platform". It exists because almost the whole country uses it. Therefore, not just corporate executives, but the whole nation should decide what speech is allowed, and we already have! Speech in privately-owned public spaces like Twitter is governed by the First Amendment to the constitution.
>It exists because almost the whole country uses it.
Simply not true. Roughly 1/10th of the US uses twitter actively. [1]
Even if everyone did use it, it's still a private platform owned by a company. Not the government. That means the company gets to run it.
Which is it? Do you want the federal government to stay out of shit, or do you want it to micromanage things? What's your stance on section 230? Without it, they would have been forced to ban Trump years ago.
Do believe publicly traded companies are the same as state or federal public entities that serve the public via taxes? I recommend you look up the difference.
I'm aware of the difference, how does that impact the understanding that publicly traded companies have waived certain rights in exchange for certain legal privileges?
They are relevant to the concept that they give up certain private property rights in order to gain other legal privileges, which is a precedent for requiring that they give up other property rights (such as the right to censor on the basis of politics, etc.).
Property rights are completely irrelevant to the discussion on hand. 'Right to censor' is a made up concept. Companies and individuals have no obligation to publish something they do not agree with. Anti-discrimination laws also do not protect Trump here. He isn't singled out for his race, sex or religion. He's singled out because he incited a seditious mob that overran Congress.
If anywhere near "most people" don't want to listen to Donald Trump, then why was he elected President? So if 51% of Americans don't want to hear about climate change should Twitter ban anyone who brings it up? I don't think so.
Your point is valid and well argued, but I have to highlight that it would be more compelling if Trump had won a majority of the 2016 vote, and if the turnout were closer to 100% (or even if every eligible voter was equally able to cast their ballot).
Let's just say, if you think that 51% of Americans banning discussion of climate change is bad, wait until you imagine about what Twitter's electoral college would ban discussion of.
You are being incredibly naive to think that the people in question are capable of changing their minds on this particular topic at this particular time.
I know Trump supporters, and even they (the ones I know) don't justify his tweets. If Twitter had used numerous previous tweets, I could personally go and argue with those supporters and feel like I was making headway.
I don't argue with them to change their mind, I argue with them for the crowd of 5-6 people listening who are on the fence. All of them were just pushed off that fence.
Would you agree that there are many ways to deliver a message?
Do you think verbally insulting my friends to the point where they can no longer communicate with me is freedom of speech?. Things are not black and white
I agree. Verbally assaulting, belittling someone, or having a physical fight never has and never will solve any problems. However, that would only be the case if we lived in a perfect world. History tells us otherwise. Also, how someone delivers their message is more deeply rooted into a persons upbringing/nurturing and life experiences than being told how to act. I personally have a couple friends that I refer to as short-fused, they tend to loose their temper in no time and over things I would think are unimportant. However, I’ve accepted them as friends because I know that those small spurts of rage do not represent their genuine friendship with me (this is from knowing them over 10 years). I’m 40 at this point and something I’ve come to realize is that every person has a cut-off age, after which, no matter what you try to teach or tell them, they will not be able to change their way of life (specifically how they interact). Does that mean that they’re a bad person? I wouldn’t know until I am personally able to engage into an interaction with him or her. My wisdom has confirmed to never judge a book by its cover and that was not the case when I was in high school. My few cents. Happy new year bud!
I’m for all speech. Regardless if I agree with it or not. I would rather debate ideas I disagree with rather than they fester underground.
“violent inciting free speech” is a subject take on Trump’s tweets whether you like it or not. I’d rather make that distinction for myself instead of relying on the judgment of some Twitter employee I’ve never met.
Yes, I can make my own judgements from the tweets, so don't need some Twitter employee to tell me the same. I think he should have been banned a lot sooner.
Cool, and you're free to block any account you want. Twitter even provides multiple ways to avoid seeing an account. So the issue was already solved. No need to further censor ideas. Individuals can make their own decision.
I will block his account, but his followers will not, that's precisely the problem, and the whole point. They will commit violence and vandalize public property instead.
So your goal then is to memory hole any account that could lead to anyone using it as justification for violence? You sound like middle-aged moms in the 90s that blamed violent video games and metal music for school shootings.
> So your goal then is to memory hole any account that could lead to anyone using it as justification for violence
Yes, but only if he/she has massive following that can actually incite "mob violence". With great power, comes great responsibility, while Trump is a kid who has been blaming everyone else for his defeat.
could have convinced millions more people that they are trying their best to apply policies evenly
Twitter is never going to convince everyone that they are being fair, and that isn't their goal here. A better way to think of their timing is: "You come at the king, you best not miss."
If Twitter had banned Trump pre-election and Trump had won anyway, the political battle afterwards for the US government to censor social media would have been terrible. Now that Trump is a lame duck and top Republicans have criticized his actions, Twitter is acting from a position of strength.
So, it's certainly taking advantage of the moment. It's a brief period when the Republican party will be unable to strongly push back against banning Trump. If they successfully pull this off, not only will Twitter get rid of an annoyance, they will set a valuable precedent that they have the right to ban the US President from their platform.
>It's strange that they picked such a poor way to justify the ban when they could have made a significantly stronger case, and in doing so could have convinced millions more people that they are trying their best to apply policies evenly.
It's clear that people are trying to make this into a cultural moment where you either distance from / renounce Trump (which is almost costless given the immanency of his term's end) or you're treated as an unrepentant enemy of civil society. We're seeing pro-Trump hubs being systematically purged in various ways from a variety of platforms right now, and the symbolic value of moves like this is what's paramount.
A bit of a grim point, but the timing is also right in that the majority of staff are currently WFH, removing much of the potential for any violent protest/retaliation at their offices. Maybe being naive but I wonder how much this has been a consideration in the past.
>As such, our determination is that the two Tweets above are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.
> Perhaps they have a strategic reason for going about this how they did
One advantage may be that once the context is forgotten it will appear that Twitter has set a low bar for banning a powerful world leader from the platform.
While I can understand Twitter's move, I think a permanent suspension of the account will do a disservice in the long run, at least the way it is implemented right now.
I made a comment before to the effect, what happens when you are banned permanently from the biggest social media platforms currently in existence?
Will these bans carry over and will they start to affect any who oppose the bans or simply parrot what he says elsewhere?
Will these spawn new social media sites or will they damage existing ones or do both? This is all so fascinating and frightening at the same time. People may want to claim there is no government interference but these sites have for many years recently reacted to the threat of it which in turn effectively is what is happening now.
I am just find this all so bizarre but I think these sites figure they can act now simply because in a short time he will not be in his position of power and lose the bully pulpit which he can use without them
Another possibility: Twitter and Facebook have become aware of skulduggery in progress that we don't know anything about yet, such as a plot centered on the inauguration ceremony on the 20th, and don't want anything to do with its participants.
Facebook in particular will obviously be the first to know about any such plot, long before any intelligence or law-enforcement agency. Twitter wouldn't be far behind.
Patriots historically refer to citizens who have taken to arms to defend their country.
When has he ever used this term before to refer to his supporters?
It's not a good time to begin to refer to your supporters in the context of using weapons to defend the country on the heels of the capitol building being stormed and four people dying during a final election recount.
The thing about manipulation is it always claims plausible deniability. We all know this.
"It's heavily taking advantage of the moment." Umm yes. Regardless of whether you are a republican or a democrat, storming capitol hill during an election recount diminishes the validity of either party and the country as a whole. This country is the center for innovation and generally the most sought after democracy in the world. The entire world is watching. Taking advantage of the moment is exactly what he is doing. If you read about coups in the past there was never an explicit sentence that drew the line between now I am and evil dictator and now I am not. It was building an army of radicalized supporters, patriots, if you will while government officials around the person in power dropped like flies as things escalated much like what is happening now. We do not need to repeat history to say we proved he did it because by that time it will be too late.
It is clear for months trump has been warned of how this kind of inflammatory behavior will impact the people at large and potentially radicalize either side and he has been nothing but inflammatory.
If he really cared about securing democracy at large as opposed to his own power in office he would be taking extra precautions at this point.
He is doing the opposite.
I get what you mean though. Unfortunately both sides have significant radicalized sides now. And looting storming buildings and murdering law enforcement and lighting fire to buildings has been normalized now by both sides in 2020.
My parents are trumpers in the deep south and these are the things they have said to me in the past couple of days:
Mark Zuckerberg is an abusive dictator not Trump.
My mother condescendingly whispered to me poor thing noone told me all the protestors were antifa who knew if they didn't storm the building and steal the ballots that trump would win. So they were all actually secret democrats.
They both believe trump is the rightful president for the next term.
Twitter, Facebook et al. have been getting a lot of flak recently for having algorithms that lead to radicalization of users (i.e. maximizing engagement/controversy for ad revenue). I think Trump is the best scapegoat they have for the alt-right radicalization phenomenon, rather than the platform themselves. The events that transpired recently are a perfect distraction for a deeper problem that lies with Big Tech.
(Similarly... I don't support Trump either, etc. etc.)
This seems like a very "engineer" response to what went on in that it misses the forest for the trees, and I don't mean that in a derogatory way (I often do it myself), just in a matter-of-fact sort of way.
On one hand, I agree with you, the actual content of those tweets is much milder than what he has tweeted before. On the other hand, that absolutely does not matter, at all. 99% of people aren't even going to read the details of what he was banned for. Those who are against him are going to think it was long overdue, and those who love him are going to see it as further evidence of Big Bad Big Tech. But in any case, the actual real, violent assault on the Capitol that was fomented by Trump is the important context of why he was banned - the details of the individual tweets are almost irrelevant.
Using that logic you are banning him because riots happened; Banning him for actions that occurred outside of twitter.
Is the beginning where people get banned from social media for being part of a unwanted group. A case could be made for preventing anyone who has gone to jail from being on the platform in the efforts to cutdown on future crime / increase children safety, etc.
Riots didn't "just happen". They happened because Trump held a rally telling his followers the lie that what was going on in the Capitol was stealing the election from him, and to march on the Capitol. His tweets were part of that message. The fact that those two particular tweets were not the most egregious ones he's ever made is pretty irrelevant.
That may be a factor but I think it's pretty easy to see why banning him now (instead of earlier) could be done without the reasons you invoked:
1. His tweets didn't incite angry mobs to assault federal buildings before
2. Some time ago when Twitter was defending why they aren't banning his account, they said something about this effectively being a public government account so banning it would do more bad than good (and instead Twitter went ahead and "annotated" his tweets instead of just removing them). This determination had both pros and cons for Trump, the pro being much harder to ban his account but the con being that he couldn't block people from replying to his tweets anymore. With him now out of office his account loses that status so it should be much easier to ban it.
You're evaluating the ban in terms of Twitter as a moral regulator of discussion, not as a media company seeking to control a maximal share of the discourse. Trump was allowed to use the platform because media companies used it to follow him and Twitter wants everyone at CNN and FOX to be reading Twitter. Trump was always going to be permanently banned from Twitter when he was no longer politically relevant simply because he's broken the rules literally hundreds of times. It simply happens that he finally ranted himself into irrelevance (Facebook's ban helps here) and Twitter realized that they could push the ban up two weeks and snag a bit of the spotlight.
He’s not going to be in power much longer, so there’s no harm ruffling his feathers now. They have confirmation with the Biden certification. That’s really all it is.
(Also because apparently I have to state this explicitly in every comment related to Trump: I do not support Trump, his supporters, the recent events that occurred at the capitol, etc etc)
It is a horrible state of affairs where you need this disclaimer in order for your ideas to be taken more seriously. Not directed at you personally, but as a descriptor of the situation.
Is it any surprise people are angry and furious and lashing out when they are dismissed solely on having differences of opinions from the establishment?
I can't agree, this is the peak of the trump era, a last hoorah for him and his followers. They will now be pushed to the fringe and Trump will go to jail for a significant amount of time in New York for serious tax fraud and bank fraud no doubt.
Trump's own behavior is the strongest case imaginable, if you're not already convinced he deserves the ban nothing twitter says is going to change that.
You imply there was some kind of due process, which there wasn't.
Perhaps it is fully within Twitter's legal rights as a private entity. That's not the issue. It's the practical implications that are terrifying. The power of censorship and influence Big Tech yields without any legal oversight is absolutely horrifying.
The practical implications of someone running their own blog are terrifying!
I mean, it's always good to have these thought exercises, but I think you're panicking a bit about the sky falling if the thought of a billionaire former president being banned from a microblog is what your mind is worried about in the current moment.
No, Twitter suspends millions of accounts, of varying notability. Obviously, they just don't get the attention that the President does.
You're clearly carefully picking words that frame the event as inconsequential. That nameless "microblog" is how millions of Americans get their news, lol.
> You imply there was some kind of due process, which there wasn't.
I'm glad you're so passionate about accountability, and you'll no doubt be shocked to hear how difficult it is to bring a legal case against a sitting president.
Clearly the way forward is to entrust silicon valley to regulate speech. Thanks for your insight.
By the way, "Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence" [0], are you interested in holding anybody to account for that?
> Clearly the way forward is to entrust silicon valley to regulate speech. Thanks for your insight.
That's an unhelpful strawman, but I'm sorry if the tone of my response to you was not constructive and disincentivized you engaging with it more seriously.
For what it's worth, I would prefer if silicon valley companies relied on the court system to decide what content to censor (or rather, kept up any content they thought was legal until required not to by a court order). Of course, spam and data which exploits software vulnerabilities should be filtered without a court order, on the basis that no reasonable person wants to receive that.
My actual intended point was quite narrow, namely that it would be practically impossible, specifically in the case of Trump's tweets, for an aggrieved party to challenge his tweets in court. However, I suppose it may be possible to bring the case against Twitter itself, and have the DOJ fight on Trump's behalf.
> Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies ... are you interested in holding anybody to account for that?
Do you mean holding Russians to account for tampering, or holding Democrats to account for believing a narrative, or unspecified other actors for "tricking" Democrats into believing this narrative (which we'll say, for the sake of argument, is a false narrative)?
I assume you mean the latter of those three interpretations, but I can't imagine who you would want to hold accountable, or by whom, or what the process or punishment should be. Surely we agree that neither social media companies nor the government should be punishing people for spreading "false" narratives (at least if those narratives don't come with implicit encouragement to commit crimes)?
>By the way, "Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered
Where does the linked page say that? The best I can find is "Half of Clinton’s voters think Russia even hacked the Election Day votes..." and the graph also shows 50/50. That's some inaccurate paraphrasing you have.
The US has very strong protections for speech and you need to pass a number of significant hurdles before you can be convicted of incitement. There is no way Trump would ever be convicted in a court of law for what he did.
Not sure why this is being downvoted, "incitement" has a very narrow definition legally, see the Brandenburg test. Of course there are many other ways to incite a mob to violence that would avoid legal consequences, which i'm sure his advisors are aware of.
If what Trump said that morning was intended to cause that violence, then it absolutely passes the “imminent lawless action” test. It specifically said to start the action immediately and was clearly likely to cause the action. The question is what his intent was.
Where did he clearly incite an illegal action? As far as I can tell his speech just told his supporters to walk to the Capitol. He didn't say anything about committing illegal acts. In fact, he explicitly said people should be peaceful. Courts are not going to try and parse secret messages from a speech when there is an explicit disavowal of any criminal act.
The rule people seem to be advocating for here is that if a politician directs their supporters to protest at a particular location then they are responsible for all illegal acts their supporters carry out at that location. That seems to be unreasonable standard and it is also a standard that legally has not been applied before. In terms of politics/media I'm sure people have tried to apply this standard but it is very wrong. It seems every time some whacko commits a crime one side will accuse the other side of inciting the crime with their rhetoric. I don't think this is at all fair and I also believe it could lead to an equilibrium where people are incentivised to commit crimes. It is often quite hard to murder a politician (ask the baseball shooter) but if you can take a piece of the board by committing a crime and getting caught then that might be better option for a whacko. Obviously, this has not happened in this case but if this standard is enforced then this is something to worry about in the future.
> There is no way Trump would ever be convicted in a court of law for what he did.
It doesn’t matter. The standards of the courtroom are not being applied here. The facts are plain: there were a hundred off ramps for Trump over the 2 months since the election and he chose to take none of them. He failed in his duty to the Presidency as an institution and the idea of separation of powers and coequal branches of government. He tried to intimidate the Congress into doing his bidding.
You get that it’s a much more essential question than whether he is technically allowed to do what he did, right? Impeachment and the 25th amendment are political remedies that must be used both to punish what this president has done and to warn other presidents that they cannot cross the bright lines that define democracy.
He is the nations principal law enforcement officer and he aided and abetted lawlessness of the most dire kind.
“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard!” - Donald J. Trump (January 6, 2021)
Anti-Kavanaugh protestors did the exact same thing 2 years ago. Maxine Watters, AOC, Ayyana Presley all did the same. Madonna literally said she would blow up the White House.
>(Also because apparently I have to state this explicitly in every comment related to Trump: I do not support Trump, his supporters, the recent events that occurred at the capitol, etc etc)
The manichaean thinking from both sides is what is really going to doom us in the long term. The other side isn't ever interested in improving the state of the world, they are evil and must be stopped. Even when they say the exact same things you said two weeks ago they are wrong, because it doesn't matter what is said, it matters who said it.
Best of luck to the future octopi civilization that will uncover these servers in the submersed ruins of the US.
Please, try to provide counter-arguments to the evidence present in the video, not just random links to half-dead legacy media. And yes, antifa are no longer affiliated with DP. If they somehow find common ground with the other extreme, things will get real stupid real quick.
As far as I can tell the video only provides evidence of one person with ties to "Insurgence USA" (a left wing group) being inside the capital during the protest. No evidence for 'antifa' and no evidence that there was any organized left-wing presence.
The FBI disagrees with 4Chan, where folks can't seem to figure out that BLM and Antifa forums had photos of white supremacists on them in order to identify them.
I truly want to know by what metric Tim Pool is anything close to the most popular journalist in the world.
Pool seems to have ~1 million subscribers, which is less than the NYT or WaPo. Not to mention TV news. Rachel Maddow gets ~3 million viewers daily, which is similar to Tucker Carlson and Hannity.
And that doesn't even begin to cover things like NBC or ABC nightly news.
A very dumb and easy question. NYT and WaPo have hundreds of journalists, so the average would be in the tens of thousands. You cannot compare an individual and a corporation in such a way. And yes, the most popular journalist today is exactly Tucker and he is not that much more thrustworthy than NYT/WaPo, at least to me.
P.S. While I agree with Pool only ~60% of the time, he has around 1.5M on his other channel.
> A very dumb and easy question. NYT and WaPo have hundreds of journalists, so the average would be in the tens of thousands.
This doesn't follow. Just as an example, Maggie Haberman (an NYT reporter) has more than 1.6 million twitter followers, around 2x Tim's and more than he has subs on any of his channels.
(More broadly, there are a number of junior reporters who don't have big followings at the NYT and other conventional institutions, but there are also a number of very well known journalists who have large followings for their specific content).
He was present. He didn't plan the thing, and it's unclear what his role was. He claims he was just there to document what happened.
The Capitol building was attacked by MAGA extremists, not Antifa. The MAGA extremists were egged on by the President and his associates and supporters.
>He was present. He didn't plan the thing, and it's unclear what his role was.
Is this goalpost moving? Your prior comment was:
>It's highly unlikely that there were any members of Antifa among the rioters, and there is also no evidence of same.
My response was simply that it's confirmed that there were antifa people present in the capitol and the evidence is their very own stream. He later went on national TV and admitted to being present.
It's irrelevant what he claims. At a minimum he riled up the mob, such action being viewed on his stream.
If you want to make the argument that storming the capitol building wasn't an antifa action, I won't argue with you. If you want to say there were no antifa people present and there is no evidence of the same, then I'll correct you as you are objectively wrong.
"he claims he was just there to document what happened."
Even though, there is a video he streamed urging people to join? Do you even believe yourself?
To be fair, it's only the second most delusional thing in that particular post after "the statistical probability of Biden getting more votes than Obama, but only in the 5 states that mattered being one to quadrillions...". It's almost as if believing this was so important it wasn't worth checking which states Biden did actually better and worse in
Please don't take HN threads further into this kind of ideological flamewar, which is equal parts dumb and inflammatory, and invariably evokes worse from others. No doubt the L-word was a minor provocation but the GP comment was at least trying to say something on-topic.
That's so patently untrue. These people have been using social media to spread nothing but disinformation. And their one and only reason for revolting is their mistaken belief that the election was stolen. Nobody needs to listen or sympathetize with their nonsense and giving them a platform has been far, far worse for the country than censoring them.
> These people have been using social media to spread nothing but disinformation.
Since when was it Twitter's job to make sure that only true things are said? "Somebody is wrong on the internet" used to be a meme, but now its a solemn responsibility of content hosts?
This is a really dangerous path as it applies to political speech.
Yeah, this move is very concerning to me. Moving forward, when any particular platform grows to the point where it becomes a candidate's primary means of being heard (the next Twitter/Facebook), those companies effectively gain the power to change the outcome of an election by censoring and demonizing that person, and doing the same to the people who support that candidate.
Imagine in the future if a company bans and demonizes a political opponent that they don't like because that candidate violated an arbitrary ToS - regardless of whether the candidate was right or wrong in violating those terms, due to the company's influence and reach, would it not, for all practical purposes, count as election interference?
The Covington story is not remotely equivalent. News organizations ran a story based on information that turned out to be inaccurate. It was sloppy, not deliberate and most of the same orgs that got it wrong ran corrections. That's misinformation.
I have no idea what you mean by the laptop story. The laptop existed and had some photos on it. The notion that it proved corruption was completely unsubstantiated and it was very clearly engineered as a political ploy.
Donald Trump and his supporters have been very deliberately concocting false stories to further a political agenda that has led to dangerous confrontations and culminated in a violent insurrection. Stories that utterly defy reality and are designed explicitly to sow discord. Stories that have hampered our covid response to the tune of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Trying to draw a parallel is absolutely ridiculous. There is a slippery slope here but we're at the bottom of that slope trying to climb right now.
False stories were allowed for weeks or months after facts were know without repurcussions
> laptop story
Stories about Hunter Biden were ACTIVELY suppressed on claims of "russian disinformation" without proof that they were in fact RD.
Stories about Trump with LESS evidence and more proof of "disinformation" are allowed to run unchecked.
> deliberately concocting false stories to further political agendas
And the same can be said of his detractors... INCLUDING among facebook/twitter. Both floating unverified stories and suppressing stories that haven't been proven false.
> explicitly sow discord
again... all the same is allowed from the left. Biden is allowed to claim "police treat BLM worse" when facts say the opposite... details that go against "trump mob violent" (IE antifa/blm individuals and groups in the "mob", cops letting protestors in, etc) are suppressed...
You want a slippery slope? allowing "facebook and twitter" to determine truth is THE slippery slope. They are biased and have been proven wrong repeatedly.
There is no "trying to climb out". Giving them unfettered power is digging the hole deeper.
It's hard to try evidence lawyers won't produce in a court of law. Because they're fucking lying to you but won't to courts - that has consequences. Lying to you has none. At least, none that they care about.
my understanding is that there were numerous occasions where Rudy Guiliani himself went to court and had opportunity to present evidence and presented nothing. Are you being disingenuous when you say "no court has tried evidence" because none was presented to them?
“To date, no court has tried evidence, nor have any administrations publicly committed to audits”
Trump’s team has notched up over 60 losses in court so far.[1]
“They are being told by the other side that there is no evidence, but this is the same other side they think have been lying to them for years, so of course these people will not believe the other side.”
Actually at this point they are being told that by senior leaders from their own side - see the statements from Republicans Brad Raffensperger and Mitch McConnell this week.
Trump and his supporters are lying to people, which is making those people angry. Allowing Trump to continue to lie to people will just continue to make them angrier.
Actually, the unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud, the frivolous legal challenges to the election results, the fomenting of rage and grievance among Trump supporters, and the attack on the Capitol building were attempts to silence and overturn the votes of the majority of voters, who elected Biden to be president.
How were they silenced? They've got mouthpieces like fox news and the president of the united states on their side for years, they can't get much louder.
That's just incredibly obtuse. Obviously "patriot" isn't an epithet but applying to the people you just incited to an armed revolt against our elected government makes this absolute worst thing he's ever said.
IANAL, but one possibility that comes to mind is that these examples are specifically chosen to limit liability. For example, if they banned Trump today based on comments he made a month ago, then someone could sue twitter for allowing speech they themselves admitted caused violence.
Twitter is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which states in relevant part, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1).
Here, Twitter is the provider of the interactive computer service (Twitter) that will not be treated as publisher or speaker of the information (tweets) provided by another information content provider (@realDonaldTrump). Therefore, Twitter will not face any civil liability for Trump's tweets.
Would you change your opinion if your life or life of your family member depends on what president says on Twitter?
Can you put yourself into shoes of SOS of Georgia, policeman in DC, senator Lindsey Graham? The mob will tear them apart if they had a chance and mob is advised to do so by Trump. I live in Trump country. A lot of Trump supporters take his calls to action literally.
Should someone's freedom be curbed if it causes harm and death to someone else?
Practically though he will still have ways to reach his base. It'd be okay if they cook in their own soup but problem is that their madness spills over and innocent people get harassed, hurt and now killed. Imagine being on the plane with dozen of Trump supporters and no bodyguard that want to punish you? That's how Mitt Romney felt few days ago. Whose freedom of speech created this situation?
It's strange that they picked such a poor way to justify the ban when they could have made a significantly stronger case, and in doing so could have convinced millions more people that they are trying their best to apply policies evenly. For example, I have a hard time imagining why they chose to specifically quote "American Patriots", as if that somehow contributes to the straw that broke the camel's back. Perhaps they have a strategic reason for going about this how they did, but I think it will have some negative 2nd/3rd order effects. that they haven't yet realized.
I imagine we are still only in the early days of the conflicts that are to come in this sphere (and I'd include just about every company and political faction in them, unfortunately).
(Also because apparently I have to state this explicitly in every comment related to Trump: I do not support Trump, his supporters, the recent events that occurred at the capitol, etc etc)