The problem is with situations like where our President tweets gifs promoting violence against people and news organizations, or attempts to instigate nuclear war via Tweet. Trump is obviously a gold mine for Twitter right now from both a growth and ad revenue standpoint (not even getting into the bot side of things), so they have a very vested interest in looking the other way.

There's also a lot of dangerous precedent that could be set if they were to block the POTUS.

So do we just say "no violent speech unless you've somehow managed to get elected"?

> There's also a lot of dangerous precedent that could be set if they were to block the POTUS.

What would that be? If anything I’d think that would be a good thing that no one would be above the rules.

It’s not like he doesn’t have other communication methods.

He could go and join Gab with all the other scum.

Would you support banning Obama for creating war with Assad, if he commented about it on Twitter?

I don't deal in hypotheticals. However I think there is a big distinction between tweeting about a war vs. actively trying to instigate one via Tweet.

Obama instigated war with Assad. If he was more active on Twitter he'd have done so via Twitter. It's not a huge stretch to imagine this.

I’ll be more direct - yes. I would absolutely support banning any person, regardless of station, from the platform for violating its rules. Trump would still be the president without Twitter, we’re not talking about impeachment here.

Would you be happy to exclude police, military and government from Twitter as a result of this? We license them to use force on our behalves.

I would absolutely support banning any person, regardless of station, from the platform for violating its rules.

And you're aware that includes all members of government, who are given a mandate for a monopoly on violence? Sorry this wasn't clear from your previous answer.

> The problem is with situations like where our President tweets gifs promoting violence against people and news organizations, or attempts to instigate nuclear war via Tweet.

That is spectacular. Our current culture war is THE reason why the Left is losing.

To be clear, if this were written as a law, it wouldn't survive the first challenge in court.

Edit: By way of further clarification, I realize that private entities have no such burdens when writing policies, but I was responding to a comparison with jurisprudence. That's not just a matter of a board making a call, or a CEO, it's the process by which an entire judiciary, over time, interprets law.

This is really nothing like it, just a set of loosely worded edicts from people who don't actually have to issue them in the first place, except to pretend that they're doing something constructive.

And it doesn't need to be a law either, just like HN doesn't need to set up a court and a trial every time it bans a user. Rough, ambiguous guidelines are ok for most internet communities.

> if this were written as a law, it wouldn't survive the first challenge in court

I think you should see some examples of hate speech law, or things like the UK's maddeningly vague anti-terrorism laws.

It took decades of deprecating and degrading the entire judicial system in the US to get to this point, finally catalyzed by 9/11.

The US literally had "I know it when I see it" as an obscenity definition long before then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

...and it didn’t survive the lengthy process of legal challenges and revision. See: Miller Test

To be fair, that was not in the Court's opinion — it was in a concurrence by Justice Stewart. People like to quote it, but it wasn't actually the law.

(A concurring opinion is written by one or more justices who joined in the Court's (majority) opinion but wish to write separately to make some separate points or explain where they diverge from the majority opinion.)

And that standard was upheld by judges who were very clear that they were wearing blindfolds when it came to obscenity law. It is a huge step backwards - Rather, many many small ones by two irredeemable groups, both with good intentions and results that are comparable to serial killers - that we're even talking about "Hate Speech" as if it were a thing.