Yes they were. The first amendment does not apply to Twitter. It applies to Trump. Absolutely nothing Twitter does is even capable of being a 1st Amendment issue.
Not true of Trump.
>Yes they were.
Where?
>Absolutely nothing Twitter does is even capable of being a 1st Amendment issue.
I agreed with that:
>>if you consider Twitter[1] a public square (as the court does), and thus you can't stop people from "petitioning the government" through it, then it's a double-edged sword: they must also protect the same speech that would be protected in a public square.
Do you understand the difference between "A implies B" and "A is true"? I was saying the former. I agree with you that the latter is false (where A="The first amendment applies to Twitter).
Can you help me to find the part of my original comment that made the above unclear?
Here: "that must mean that Twitter banning people is also a violation of the first amendment"
That's... pretty darn clear.
> Can you help me to find the part of my original comment that made the above unclear?
The first two lines of your comment frame your response as counter to the position of the person you are replying to. That would be counter to you new claim that you agree it's not a 1st Amendment issue.
Disagreement with a claim followed by an argument is generally taken by readers as an argument as to why the claim is wrong, not right. Just so you know for future writing.
>That's... pretty darn clear.
Yes, it's clearly supporting exactly what I originally claimed: that the OP was saying this ruling implies that Twitter must do X and is therefore absurd, not that the OP thinks Twitter must do X. Again, the concept of a reductio ad absurdum, extremely common in internet forums like this one: "You claimed X, which implies Y, which is absurd. So X must be wrong."
"The first amendment doesn't apply to Twitter" doesn't engage with that at all.
>The first two lines of your comment frame your response as counter to the position of the person you are replying to. That would be counter to you new claim that you agree it's not a 1st Amendment issue.
Not when I'm objecting to the attribution and clarified specifically what I meant.
>Disagreement with a claim followed by an argument is generally taken by readers as an argument as to why the claim is wrong, not right. Just so you know for future writing.
What about when I disagree with the attribution of a claim and want to clarify someone's point? What other way could I have possibly clarified the parent's point so that you wouldn't misinterpret my comment? Just so I know for future writing.
If you just didn't read what I wrote or didn't follow the actual discussion, you should probably just own up to it and not make up some story about how there's an actual improvement possible over the original post. (FWIW, you still can't seem to think of such an improvement.)
If I may make a suggestion, the problem might be that you immediately think that any critical comment must be disagreeing with everything in that comment, even if the text of comment says otherwise, and you can therefore ignore the text. That's an error on your end to correct, and there's nothing in my writing that would fix it.
The court emphatically did not find that, and, to address the footnote:
> [1] technically, the subset of it involving interaction with government officials
Nope, not even that.
The court found the virtual space created by the @realDonaldTrump account, specifically, to be, as a result of government action, a “public forum” under existing First Amendment case law, which holds that government actions with regard to participation in such a forum are restricted by the First Amendment such that government officials may not engage in, among other things, viewpoint-based censorship of public participation in such forums.
> It seems a more sane resolution is to treat Twitter like a private venue where an official addresses some members of the public
The court hear is applying exactly the existing law of privately owned spaces in which the government opens a public interactive forum of the same type; this isn't a new rule for social media.
>The court emphatically did not find that [Twitter is a public square]
>>[1] technically, the subset of it involving interaction with government officials
>Nope, not even that
>The court found the virtual space created by the @realDonaldTrump account, specifically, to be, as a result of government action, a “public forum” under existing First Amendment case law,
Wait, what? You just said that the court did not find find Twitter to be a public square ... then you said that it found Twitter to be a public "forum". So... you're introducing a distinction between a public square and a public forum? It seems that obligates you to explain the difference between the two, or you're just contradicting yourself. And yet you didn't, or you expect it to be obvious, even though the chief way to resolve the disagreement would be to address precisely that distinction!
You also made a big show of objecting to my claim that the applicability was to a subset of Twitter, and then in the very next line said that the applicability is to "the virtual space created by the [Trump] account". Er ... yeah, that's a subset of Twitter!
Now, I agree I could have been more precise about the boundaries of this subset, but it seems either pedantic or confused on your part to object to that line right before you paraphrase the part of the decision that limits the applicability to a subset of Twitter! I honestly don't know what you think you're refuting there. Even if the bulk of my point is wrong, the footnote is correct insofar as it recognizes that the ruling is limited to certain government-related parts of Twitter, which you agree with.
>> It seems a more sane resolution is to treat Twitter like a private venue where an official addresses some members of the public
>The court hear is applying exactly the existing law of privately owned spaces in which the government opens a public interactive forum of the same type; this isn't a new rule for social media.
Yes, you can certainly claim that, and cite reasoning that says as much, but it's not responsive to my justification for why it doesn't make sense to begin with. As an attempt to ground my disagreement, I introduced a comparison to a press conference or the correspondent's dinner, and characterized Trump's Twitter interaction as being the same kind of thing "with more capacity". Many government pronouncements do not happen in an environment in which they have to permit everyone's comments -- certainly not announcements of new policy decisions.
I agree that you can copy-paste someone's decision that "hey, I'm calling this a public forum". But I gave a specific reason why it isn't. To further the discussion would require articulation of why that reasoning is flawed, not simply a repetition of the judge's original premises.
So, I appreciate that you think I erred and are trying to correct a mistake, but I just don't see how your comment makes headway: you're just introducing distinctions that you don't justify, denying claims and then apparently agreeing with them, and then reasserting things that I specifically objected to with reasoning without addressing said reasoning. I don't know what you expect such a comment to accomplish beyond showing that you can paraphrase a decision while not engaging with the precise objections to it.
Furthermore, the entire point of my comment was to clarify the OP's point, so any objection to the substance of said point should be directed at the OP's comment, armed with the greater clarity of their point that my comment offered, not to mine.
If your goal was to appear knowledgeable of the ruling and too informed for anyone to risk disagreeing with, your comment makes a lot more sense though. I don't find that to be as helpful as direct engagement with arguments though.
The parent was pointing out why the logic is dubious, using a reductio: if you consider Twitter[1] a public square (as the court does), and thus you can't stop people from "petitioning the government" through it, then it's a double-edged sword: they must also protect the same speech that would be protected in a public square.
It seems a more sane resolution is to treat Twitter like a private venue where an official addresses some members of the public, like the room for the Correspondents Dinner: they have no obligation to let any specific person in (esp. after they're deemed abusive). It's just that Twitter is a private venue with a much higher capacity.
The right to petition the government is not the right to petition it in every possible venue. US Citizenship or personhood does not mean you can e.g. ask questions at a press room briefing; there are filters they can apply.
[1] technically, the subset of it involving interaction with government officials