Give me a break, the president should have his twitter account permabanned for all his ToS violations, and he should use official channels like a .gov web site to address the nation, where he can be held more accountable when spreading blatant falsehoods and certainly won't be censored.

This whole sham of using Twitter is a freedom of private speech trick he uses to facilitate ambiguously mixing occasionally factual official statements with trash "protected" speech.

If anyone holds his feet to the fire for tweets, he can simply claim he was acting as a private citizen stating an opinion - obviously the president of the united states wouldn't use twitter for official business!

I look forward to seeing how history treats this embarrassingly incompetent era of american politics.

> he should use official channels like a .gov web site to address the nation, where he can be held more accountable when spreading blatant falsehoods and certainly won't be censored.

I'm calling/writing my congress-critter today to ask that they look into doing exactly this

I think verified government accounts based on a person's role in the government would make more sense. It gets rid of the ambiguity you're talking about. If Trump was forced to tweet from @potus, the verified account for the POTUS, that makes it clear he's communicating as the POTUS, not a private citizen.

Personal accounts should be subject to the same rules as everyone else. Give official government accounts special treatment; can't be banned, no censorship, etc..

I don't think that addresses the problems sufficiently.

Official government statements should come through more secure channels than a privately owned and operated web site that arguably resembles a 21st century tabloid where people's accounts are regularly hacked or otherwise taken over, and both censorship and access are arbitrary and unregulated.

Just today we have an example of a C-SPAN political editor admitting to having lied about their Twitter account being hacked to abdicate responsibility for comments they made on the platform [0].

Such claims would not only be unbelievable coming from secure government owned and operated channels, but would be damming to the administration should they honestly occur, incentivizing running such services properly without such vulnerabilities and with an immutable audit trail.

Furthermore, if a .gov provided forums for open public discussion in response to official statements, they would actually be protected under the 1st amendment. Unlike on private platforms like Twitter, where arbitrary censorship and blocking of discussion/access is perfectly legal.

All of this junk occurring on private websites like Twitter/FB is completely misguided and a tremendous disservice to the American public.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/media/steve-scully-cspan-susp...

> Official government statements should come through more secure channels than a privately owned and operated web site

This can be done today. An application communicating via an open and federated social protocol can be stood up on government infrastructure/DNS namespace. These systems already exist and work.

I would be 100% onboard with a complete ban on social media use for government officials conducting government business. Add in a Wikipedia style diff history for official government policies / positions and it sounds even better IMO.

> immutable audit trail

This would be amazing because knowing that something is un-delete-able might cause some politicians to take a pause and think about what they're saying. Some. Lol.

But if the president did make major announcements on HN, he would not be subject to moderation on here? If the president has unilaterally imposed these restrictions on what Twitter can do by virtue of using it, he should make it official and make Twitter a public service. Otherwise, I don't understand how this is different than the president showing up at your house yelling at you with a megaphone and refusing to leave because your property has now "taken on a different role".

What hacker communities did you grow up in where the only free speech worth protecting was the US President's?

Telling Twitter what to say violates their free speech.

I have to agree with this. How is this really any different than blocking spam links or links to undesirable websites in direct messages? How does it differ from moderators on a website removing users from a group for valid or for trivial reasons? Does a company like Twitter have any obligation to allow anything it doesn't want on its platform?

This situation is very much a double-bind. In this case, someone gets to make noise about the "truth they won't let you see" and claim bias.